while I bake a birthday cake...

I'll tell you about dinner! Bananas and their cousins, Plaintains, attract fruit flies faster than any food I've seen, so I wanted to get them out of my kitchen as quickly as possible. I would have made the Cuban-Style Black Beans with Rice and Plaintains for dinner last night but I had my heart set on doing one of my own recipes in order to redeem myself for the Red Rice and Beans disaster.

So, tonight I rescued the plaintains from the microwave prison in which I've been hiding them in an ardent attempt to prevent the aforementioned fruit flies from invading my home. By the way - it appears to have worked. Shows you how frequently I use my microwave, though. Anyway, I "topped and tailed" them, skinned them and cubed them, then sauteed them until they were just a little browned and crispy. I discovered that the 1 cup of broth I was cooking the black beans and peppers in reduces to a nice thick sauce in the time it takes me to (once again) completely underestimate the amount of time it will take to cook brown rice.

I have a love-hate relationship with brown rice but we'll save that tale of woe for another time.

Anyway, it was a tasty and different little dinner. I was looking for something a little more piquant, but then again, I left out the three different members of the onion family written into the recipe in favor of a dash of onion powder. I more or less have a hate-hate more relationship with onions, but we'll definitely save that rant for later. I felt like I had been quite liberal with my salting, especially considering that I was using canned black beans and vegetable broth, but it tasted just a little too bland. I think, though, the bland may have been coming from the cooked-in-water brown rice and the dish just wasn't powerful enough to overcome that.

In other news, I am currently baking the Cinnamon Walnut Coffee Cake from La Dolce Vegan by Sarah Kramer. It smells so good. Mister and I are not big fans of cake, but that seems to be attributed mainly to the lack of good icings out there. Have you noticed that? How a too sweet icing can absolutely ruin a perfectly good cake? So I'm trying to decide if I really feel like risking the corruption of what presently smells like a great cake to coat it with Maple Icing from How It All Vegan (it's just a Sarah Kramer kind of night!).

The part of me that hates cakes with icing is battling with a long-ago memory of Mister making me a cake for my birthday and stating that birthday cakes require icing...and it is his birthday...

post script: the cake is way too pretty to ice: