Of madeleines and momos 🥟
Plus, eating green slip-skin grapes in the dark of the night, a Good Banana Bread, and more.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things I Ate! This week we bake some cozy bakes, and have some Hudson Valley adventures. Check out past posts here, and please follow my Instagram @fivethingsiate.
Oatmeal banana bread with butter and hot coffee at home
Adapted from Joy the Baker
I had a supremely good breakfast today: Hot coffee with whole milk and a teaspoon of brown sugar, half a sliced apple, and a thick rectangle of oatmeal banana bread toasted in the toaster oven with lots of butter on top, so that the top becomes drenched with melted butter. Light roast coffee with milk and brown sugar is so good. I made this old school Weight Watchers low fat oatmeal banana bread the other day, not because I condone Weight Watchers, but because I ran out of butter in the house. I actually really liked it. I don’t know if it’s because I am a child of the 90s which means I grew up in the whole grain, low fat everything era, or what. But this is a banana bread that actually tastes like bread, instead of tasting like a slice of cake. There’s nothing wrong with eating a slice of cake for breakfast, which is one of my favorite pastimes. But sometimes I do want a slice of quick bread that’s a bit heartier. I didn’t follow the instructions for whipping egg whites and simply mixed all the wet ingredients and sugar together, then added all the dry ingredients. To make it pretty, sprinkle oats on top before baking. Best of all, it’s Not Too Sweet.
Brown butter madeleines at home
Adapted from Sally’s Baking Addiction.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a “proper” madeleine – because the line to Dominique Ansel is always too damn long. So, I can’t tell you whether or not I achieved madeleine perfection with these little brown butter cakes, especially since I didn’t have a mixer on hand, so I beat the eggs and sugar manually. But I can tell you that the recipe yielded adorable little shell-shaped cakes that were crispy on the outside and dense, eggy, and moist on the inside, and best of all, they were no harder to make than Fancy Pancakes. I followed this recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction, browning the butter instead of just melting it (make sure it doesn’t burn!) and it made a perfect 3 pans of little cakes. They aren’t supposed to last for more than 15 minutes, but I found it still to be a pleasant tea-cake the next day, tightly covered.
Butter tea at Momo Valley
455 Main St, Beacon, NY 12508
I’ve had butter tea before— back when I lived in Cambridge for graduate school, where it would snow and snow in the winter, we would all pile into a Nepalese restaurant after a long day at the lab and eat the warm rich food. But I’ve never had butter tea like this before— a butter tea that reminds me of crispy toast soaked with butter and cream. It has the tiniest hint of salt, just enough to make the whole thing taste even richer than it is. Sipping the warm tea from a hot mug felt like being an infant again, coddled and secure. If you do visit Momo Valley in Beacon – which is a perfect day trip from New York – make sure to go early in the day, because the butter tea tends to sell out by dinnertime.
Beef momos in onion soup at Momo Valley
455 Main St, Beacon, NY 12508
If you are a meat eater, this is the best item on the menu at Momo Valley. (If you’re not, the whole back side of the menu has vegan options!) The momos are hot and juicy, filled with good quality beef. They’re not too big and the skin isn’t too thick, so you don’t feel overwhelmed by the fact that they’re little meat dumplings wrapped in dough. The real standout here, though, is the humbly named “onion soup,” which sounds much less appetizing than it really is. Where you might have pictured French onion soup or some broth with rings of onions floating in it, this is a rich, creamy, milky broth, with a tiny hint of spice and greens in it, to boot. I could just order two bowlfuls of the soup to drink on its own.
Green slip-skin grapes at home
These are rare finds, but you can try farmer’s markets or farm stands in the Hudson Valley or New Jersey.
I rarely eat grapes, not because I don’t like them, but because the ones that I love are hard to find. Concord grapes, the dark purple grapes that make Welch’s grape juice taste the way it does, are one of my favorites. But even better are the green slip-skin grapes that are even tarter and more grape-tasting than Concords. I rarely ever see them at the grocery, but apparently it’s grape season now, so you may have better luck. It’s a joy, and a delight, to eat green slip-skin grapes in the half-dark glow of the kitchen counter light after everyone in the house has gone to sleep. They burst inside of my mouth like sour candy, like the most grape flavored grape you’ve ever eaten. In comparison the purple ones taste only sweet, barely grape at all. The best grapes have seeds inside, but I don’t mind at all.
Stay cozy,
Soph
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