Inspired by The Orangette

I’ve talked about my admiration for Molly Wizenberg’s writing before and yesterday’s food choices were much inspired by her blog “The Orangette” and her recent book. On Sunday evening, I baked chocolate chip-banana bread and I think it was one of the top 3 banana breads that I’ve ever eaten (tooting my own horn, just a bit!) The recipe is based on Molly’s ginger-chocolate chip banana bread, but I made a few modifications. I omitted the crystallized ginger, used whole wheat flour instead of white flour, and used non-fat greek yogurt instead of regular yogurt. The results were divine – the bread was extremely moist, just sweet enough, and the addition of whole wheat flour makes it (almost) healthy.  I ate this bread (covered in chunky peanut butter) for breakfast, lunch, and dessert yesterday. So good!

My dinner was another Orangette-inspired meal. According to Molly, the French often eat radishes with butter, salt, and baguette.  I was a little skeptical of this (radishes? butter? for a meal?!!), but the Farmer’s Market had some great looking radishes this weekend so I decided to give it a try. The result: Delicious! I mean…any combination of butter and baguette has to be at least a little yummy. I sliced the radishes, spread hunks of bread with butter, sprinkled on some sea salt, and made little sandwiches. The radish variety that I bought was called “French Breakfast”  and they were lovely, long, and rosy pink.  The creamy butter and salt really complemented the peppery bite of the radish. If you’ve never been a fan of radishes, this technique may change your mind. Buy some fresh butter, a crusty baguette, some lovely radishes, and pretend you’re French for the day :-)