Sunflower field in Osaki

So this is where we`ve been for one of our dates in this summer. We took a motorcycle ride for 30 km to the north to get to a wide open space with green, yellow, and blue all over the place.

Sunflowers were everywhere we looked. That 1-hour long ride under the burning sun was totally payed off here.

Alright, if you were at this place, what would you do other than taking pictures like crazy? Tell me.

Not adoring these gorgeous ladies is a crime. And not taking pictures of them  is even a bigger crime.

I have no idea what I was doing there, but it is possible that I thought I could communicate with them.

Meh. Maybe not.
And fyi, I`m 156 cm tall and that`s not enough to compete with most of those flowers.

And this lil` boy just wouldn`t leave me alone.

What`s on your mind when you look at this?
Me, I want to eat it! Oh, just look at that vivid yellowness.

And here`s the last one, before going home.

And no, I didn`t eat any of them, in case you`re about to scream at me.
Hope you enjoyed the virtual trip with us!

Pineapple and cucumber in spicy light syrup

The idea of eating fruits with chili, which is my nature by the way, never fails to bring out the puzzled looks on my Japanese friends` faces whenever I mention it. It was sort of Fruits with chili?? Really?? faces. And that was when I realized how I basically grew up  and live up chewing chili with almost any kind of food. Chocolate with chili? Tried it last year. What an interesting taste!

Anyway, the fruit drink I made here is basically a lighter and partly drinkable (or slurpable) version of Indonesian fruit salad called rujak, which is a mix of cut fruits like mango, cucumber, and pineapple dressed with sweet and spicy sauce made of dark brown, chili, and tamarind. I do love rujak the way it is, but  at the moment I need to keep the thought of eating the fruits with the thick sugar paste  (aka. more sugar less water) away. After all, slurping the cold  spicy syrup (aka. more water less sugar) with occasional fruits chewing is what I am craving for these super hot days.

I only used pineapple and cucumber here, but you`re certainly welcome to experiment with your favorite fruits. Maybe next time I`ll go with apple.

So, start with pineapple. My first time dealing with fresh pineapple was just a year ago (I know!). Having to peel off its skin was my only reason for not buying pineapple. But when I found pineapples sold with a  serving guidance tagged on them, my pineaple-less days were over.

So, if you too are intimidated by the skin like I was, I hope this guidance can be handy for you. It`s in Japanese, but I`m sure you can figure it out from the pictures.

Peel off the skin and cut up the pineapple. Oh, I love this last part of the cutting process.

Next is cucumbers. After the pineapple, they come very easy to handle with. Slice them up in any shapes you like.

Mix the cut pineapple and cucumbers in a container.

Now for those of you who are new with eating fruits with chili, here comes the challenge.
Throw in sliced chili. It depends on how much you can handle the heat, but you can  certainly use much less chili than I did. I turn crazy when it comes to chili and you don`t have to be like me.
And by the way, I used dried chili because that`s what I got here. Go with fresh chili (deseed or not, depending on your heat tolerance) whenever you can because the fresh skin are soft enough to eat. The skin of the dried ones are actually a little too hard and papery to chew, so I sometimes boil them together with the syrup. And since I said sometimes, this time I just threw them in with the fruits and let the syrup soften them a bit after several hours soaking.

Because I skipped the boiling work, I used hot water to dissolve dark brown sugar in a cup.

Add this chili powder, vinegar, and a pinch of salt. If you have tamarind in hands, use the juice instead of vinegar.

Just make the syrup thick, pour it in batches to the fruits while thinning it out with water, and adjust the taste until  the fruits are completely soaked up in the container. For me, I like it to be lightly sweet but with intense heat and sourness. For a rough measurement, I added 1 tbs sliced chili, 3 tbs brown sugar, 6 tbs of vinegar, and a pinch of salt to a total volume of 750 ml fruits and water, which was my container capacity.

Add peanuts too. You can sprinkle the peanuts later when serving for a greater crunch factor, or before soaking to make them mushy. Whichever it is, please add the peanuts. Trust me.

Close the container tightly and keep it in refrigerator for several hours before serving. The longer you soak the fruits, the more they gain the taste. Ah, heaven.

Ready for the challenge?

Ingredients:

Pineapple

Cucumbers

Dark brown sugar or palm sugar

Chili

Chili powder
Vinegar or tamarind juice

Salt

Peanuts
Water

Chocolate banana muffins

Have you ever had your banana so overripe and blackened that no one in the house wouldn`t touch it? Well. I have. In fact, many times. And it felt as if I was the most horrible person on earth when I decided to threw them away as I used to consider them as "ugly and non-edible" food. Guilty!

But it`s different now. In a good way. Thanks to Nigella, again, there are good recipes in her Nigella Kitchen book that transform these bad-looking banana into something more appetizing. One of the recipes was this chocolate banana muffins. I made some changes with the original recipe, which were less banana (as I only had one left),  less sugar, and less oil. Oh, and I added choc bar.

So, speaking of bad, how bad did my banana look like?
This bad. Sad, right? I feel sad just looking at it.

No worries, though, as we`re about to do some magic here. Ready with your magic wand whisk?

Peel off the skin, put the banana in a mixing bowl, and mash it up with a whisk. If your banana is ripe enough, or overripe like mine was, mashing it up would be very very easy, although  using a whisk will probably leave a bit of texture.

Whisk in vegetable oil (I used olive oil, regular one) and few drops of vanilla oil. And love potion too, if you have it.

Beat in eggs...

...brown sugar...

...then chocolate bars broken - or torn, as they were already melting out in my hot kitchen - into small chunks.

Note 1: The original recipe calls for cocoa powder mixed with flour to be added later on, but I wanted to use the chocolate bars that had been sitting for ages in my kitchen. 

Note 2: If you omit the chocolate, you`d better add more sugar because with the amount of sugar I used here (see Ingredients), the muffin itself  doesn`t taste sweet enough. 

Fold in sifted flour and baking soda.

And spoon the mixture into muffin tin lined with parchment paper or muffin cups.
Bake for 15 mins at 200 C.

Here they are, puffing up delightfully! Not so ugly anymore, huh?
My muffins came out in irregular shapes of course. I can`t remember if I`ve ever made something neatly.

So let me show you again what the magic did. 

From this:

To this:

And you can totally smell the banana aroma coming out from these fluffy muffins filled with heavenly oozes of dark chocolate.

My husband is not big on some particular fruits and banana are one of them. He also tends to freak out whenever we had blackened banana in our house. Even so, he already ate three (three!) muffins while I am typing this. Wonderful day. 

So this is my Wednesday resolution: I will never, ever, throw away my banana, again.

Ingredients (adapted from Nigella Kitchen):

Makes for 12 muffins
1 overripe banana

100 ml olive oil

2 whole eggs

80 g brown sugar

Vanilla oil

80 g dark chocolate
200 g cake flour
1 tsp baking powder

Bake at 200 C for 15 min