Cooking at home in Korea: The banana bread incident.

I have decided to start sharing some of my cooking adventures on here.

A warning.
 
I have a love-love relationship with food, and a love-hate relationship with cooking.

It's like my relationship with art – I love looking at paintings and admiring photos, sculptures, etc.  This love, in turn, makes me want to create and contribute to the world of art.  But I have no technical ability.

I also love food.  But I'm occasionally disastrous in the kitchen – like the time I exploded a glass oven dish while making chicken Parmesan.  Or the time I burnt myself while making spaghetti.  (I used rags as potholders and one of them caught on fire from the stovetop flame).  And then there were the 3+ times I botched chocolate chip cookies.  (They basically came out as scones.)

I am not deterred.  I love eating, and I love eating food that I've cooked.

Cooking in Korea.

In Korea, the GEPIK ESL teacher's apartment generally comes fully stocked with everything except an oven (or toaster).  Instead of a toaster, I got a rice cooker, which would be awesome except I eat a massive portion of rice every day for lunch, and never feel like making it in my time off.

So I scored a toaster oven.  Specifically, a terrible awful toaster oven that can't even cook toast.  Or rather, it can't cook an entire piece of toast.  It has no problem burning the top and leaving the bottom fluffy white (no wheat bread to be found in my neighborhood).  Naturally, after I discovered it couldn't handle toast even on the proper settings thatanannonymouskindchatboardpersontranslatedforme, I chucked toast from my diet and put the toaster in my cabinet, never to be used again.

the confusing settings

Until I decided that I really wanted banana bread and maybe I had been mistaken about the ineptitude of my toaster oven and after all banana bread is totally different than toast so maybe it would come out much better and I had three black bananas in my freezer and that was clearly a sign so I might as well try because what's the worst that can happen.

The batter was delicious.  I should have stopped there, but I was worked up into a frenzy of tasty banana sweet goodness.  So I placed it in the toaster oven to bake.  After a couple hours, I had succeeded.  It was a beautiful golden brown creation that smelled divine.  Underneath the top layer, it might have been a tad underdone, but on the whole it was excellent.  Then I got nitpicky.  I decided that I didn't want to eat bread that 90% batter, even if the batter tasted like batter on The Food Network probably tastes.  (Really.)  So I cut off the layer of cooked bread on top and shoved it into the middle so that the batter could cook.

A few hours later, I had a broken up, partially burnt, partially underdone, scraggly loaf of banana bread.   Sigh.  

the toaster oven banana bread fiasco

Posted in: banana bread in toaster oven, Cooking, cooking in korea, cooking in korea 2012, cooking in toaster over