Blogiversary Week Review: FIT Homemade Granola

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From a narrative perspective, I've always thought that a personal trainer would make an excellent romance dominant. I mean, you have this person whose job it is to push physical and mental limits while still knowing when to back off so no one gets hurt. The best ones have a certain style: part encouragement, part toughness and applying both appropriately. And if there's the potential for physical attraction, often just a little bit of innocuous flirting. Unfortunately, a lot of BDSM romance seems to regard the role of the dominant as being an asshole who is maybe even vaguely threatening. Not that there isn't a place for that kind of story, but it's a little frustrating to see the same basic character repeated in every book. Rebekah Weatherspoon's FIT trilogy takes a different approach, making for a fresh sort of read.

In FIT, the first of a linked trilogy that saw its last book released this week, personal trainer Grant Gibson takes on Violet Ryan as a client after Violet has a horrible experience in a group fitness class that reduces her to tears. Violet is a producer on a foodie reality show and between her job and her friend Faye encouraging her to make bad lifestyle decisions, she's put on a bit more weight than she's comfortable with. But the fitness instructor recommends Grant as a personal trainer, wisely thinking that he might have an approach that will suit her.

There are a lot of things to love about this book. First, Grant isn't your typical romance dominant. Sure, he's in charge in the bedroom, but he's got the kind of self-assurance that is actually sexy versus the overbearing bossiness that seems more common in these types of books. He's less about barking orders than he is about rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behavior in a way that's both welcome to Violet and believable to the reader. And the way he uses sexual rewards to motivate Violet is super fun to read.

Another thing I loved about this book is that it displays some self-awareness that this is actually an ethically questionable scenario. It's not one that I personally have a lot of resistance to, but it was nice to see the issue addressed of whether the games they're playing together are appropriate in light of their professional relationship. And that tension resolves in an interesting way too.

Finally, FIT doesn't shy away from the difficulties inherent in portraying a woman who wants to lose weight. I thought there was a really good balance between her reality and her desires--it's a story that can come off as fat-shaming, but the way it was handled really worked for me.

FIT is a good, short read. Save it for the treadmill at the gym! Just...don't get too distracted and hurt yourself. Cuz parts of it are pretty...um...distracting. Hot stuff! I recommend it.

A few weeks ago, I did something I'd never really done before. I had this recipe I wanted to share and so I started asking around in Twitter for hippie romances, having grown up as a Bay Area kid who pretty much subsisted on fruit leather and granola. Not fruit roll-ups, those corn syrup filled parodies of food or chocolate-dipped chewy granola bars. Nope. The no-sugar-added stuff we could only buy at our health food co-op. But hippie romances are kinda few and far between. So I was super pleased when I tripped over a granola mention in FIT not too long after.

Homemade granola is a little bit time consuming because it has to cook for an hour and 15 minutes and you have to stir it every quarter hour, but it makes a pretty big batch and keeps for up to a month in a sealed container on the counter. And other than the time factor, it's super easy.

This may be only a "me" problem, but all the baking I do frequently leaves me with random ends of bags of nuts and dried fruit. Not enough to do anything substantial with, but it's not like they're roasted and salted so they're not super delicious on their own. I basically throw whatever tree nuts and dried fruit I have on hand into this granola. So it's super flexible. Basically whatever you like will probably work, though I'd chop up stuff like dried apricots, dates or figs.

And in a couple months, I'll show you something else you can do with this granola. But I'm gonna be super sneaky and cagey and not tell you what this is yet. Cuz it's a sekrit. Shhhhh.

Homemade Granola
Adapted from Alton Brown's Granola Recipe

3 cups rolled oats
2 cups whatever tree nuts happen to be on hand or on sale (slivered almonds, chopped walnuts, chopped pecans, hazelnuts or a combination)
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup maple syrup
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup dried fruit (raisins, blueberries, cranberries or a combination) OPTIONAL


1. Preheat oven to 250 degrees F.

2. In a large bowl, combine the oats, nuts and brown sugar. Stir well, making sure brown sugar is well incorporated.

3. Next add oil, maple syrup and salt. Pour onto 2 sheet pans. Cook for 1 hour and 15 minutes, stirring every 15 minutes to achieve an even color. At the 15 minute ark, add the dried fruit (if using).

4. Remove from oven and transfer into a large bowl. Let cool and then cover tightly. Keeps up to one month tightly sealed.

Disclosure: Rebekah Weatherspoon and I follow each other on Twitter, but I bought FIT for myself.

Christmas Morning Bananas Foster Waffles

Strangely enough, all my family's Christmas food traditions are Christmas Eve based. I'm from San Francisco originally and Christmas Eve always meant cold Dungeness crab and french onion soup. Christmas Eve was always the best because we would sit around with our next door neighbors and sing carols and eat treats all afternoon. Our neighbors were British and they'd always bring over sausage rolls. I still make them from my neighbor's recipe, which involves boxed pie crust mix. I suppose some day I ought to make a proper crust for them, but nostalgia holds me back.

Christmas Day was always kind of hodge podgey though. My whole extended family lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and we would often visit multiple relatives up and down the Peninsula, even into the City and the East Bay. So as an adult, I've developed my own Christmas food traditions. The most important one and the one I do every year because it's the sort of thing that one really oughtn't eat all the time is Bananas Foster Waffles.

It's a pretty basic bananas foster recipe based on this one by Alton Brown, but banana liqueur tastes awful, orange zest is overkill and the recipe doesn't generate quite enough sauce for waffles so I've amended it over the years. I usually make the waffles and sauce at the same time, but if this is your first time making bananas foster, I'd cook the waffles before starting the sauce and stash them in a warm oven. If you're cooking for more than two, double the quantities, but keep the alcohol amount the same since you're setting it on fire. It will still taste fine.

And Merry Christmas from Cooking Up Romance! I hope you and your family and friends find joy in the day.

Bananas Foster Waffles
adapted from Food Network

Time: 12 minutes
Makes: 2 servings

4 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
1 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg

2 tablespoons water
2 under ripe bananas, sliced in half lengthwise
1/2 cup dark rum

1. Melt butter in a heavy skillet over low heat. Add brown sugar, allspice, nutmeg and water and stir until sugar dissolves. Bring sauce to simmer. 

 

2. Add bananas and cook for 1 minute on each side. Remove bananas from pan to a serving dish. 

 

3. Bring sauce to a simmer and carefully add the rum. If the sauce is very hot, the alcohol will flame on its own. If not, using stick flame, carefully ignite and continue cooking until flame dies out, approximately 1 to 2 minutes. If sauce is too thin, cook for 1 to 2 minutes until it is syrupy in consistency. 

 

4. Immediately spoon the sauce over bananas and serve. Serve with waffles. These ones work well.

Bourbon Caramel Pecan Cinnamon Buns

Here at Cooking Up Romance, I post a romance novel review with a matching recipe on Mondays and then Thursdays usually mean a brief essay on some topic tangential to my interest in romance like how to find great writers on Twitter and why romance gets so little literary credit. This week though, my brush with romance was actually a recipe rather than some profound philosophical discourse (ha!).

I was testing out a recipe for chocolate ice cream with a bourbon caramel swirl and it left me with a lot more caramel than I had an immediate use for. Enter Shari Slade, Queen of Temptation. She suggested pouring the caramel in the bottom of a pan of cinnamon rolls, which as a solution to my caramel problem seemed like a super one.

Do you know Shari? She just released a wildly delicious book with Amber Lin called Three Nights with a Rock Star , which is basically the romance equivalent of Bourbon Caramel Pecan Cinnamon Rolls: sweet, decadent and totally addictive. I thought it was great, but if you want a full review, you can see mine here at Goodreads. Seriously, go buy the book.

So...these cinnamon rolls. I knew they'd be good, but I really didn't know that they'd be this good. The bourbon in the caramel is subtle, acting like a secret ingredient for awesome. Seriously, I sent most of the batch to work with my husband and I got an actual marriage proposal. Delivered by my husband. By the time they were gone, people were offering to drive seven hours to snag some. So they're pretty delicious.

I started with this recipe for cranberry orange rolls from Smitten Kitchen for the dough. I kind of winged it when it came to quantities of brown sugar, cinnamon, pecans and caramel to use since I never intended to post the recipe. So I had to make them again in order to double-check quantities and rise times. Twenty-four cinnamon rolls in two days. Whoopee! Now that's what I call wild.

You'll probably need a glass of milk or cup of coffee to go with these. Or, you know, you could just go with bourbon. I suspect I can guess what Shari would say about that.


Bourbon Caramel Pecan Cinnamon Buns
adapted from Smitten Kitchen and Food & Wine
Makes: 12 buns
Total Time: 5-6 hours (1 hour hands on time), can be refrigerated overnight for morning baking

Dough
4 large egg yolks
1 large whole egg
1/4 cup granulated sugar
6 tablespoons butter, melted, plus additional to grease pan
3/4 cup buttermilk (I used powdered buttermilk: 3 tablespoons added to 3/4 cup of 2% milk)
3 3/4 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting counter
1 packet instant dry yeast
1 1/4 teaspoons coarse or kosher salt
1 teaspoon oil for bowl

Topping
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup water
1/2 tablespoon light corn syrup
1/2 cup heavy cream
1/4 cup bourbon (or whiskey, or rye)

Filling
1 1/2 tablespoons butter, softened
3/4 cup packed light brown sugar
1 tablespoon cinnamon
1 cup chopped pecans, 4 tablespoons reserved

1) To start the dough, in the bottom of the bowl of a stand mixer, whisk the yolks, whole egg, sugar, melted butter and buttermilk.

2) Add 2 cups of the flour along with the yeast and salt; stir until evenly moistened. Switch to the dough hook and add the remaining 1 3/4 cups flour and let the dough hook knead the mixture on low speed for 5 to 7 minutes. The dough should be soft and moist, but not overly sticky.

3) Scrape the dough into a large, lightly oiled bowl and cover it with plastic wrap. Let dough rise at room temperature until doubled, which will take between 2 and 2 1/2 hours.

4) While the dough rises, make the caramel. In a heavy-bottomed medium saucepan, bring the sugar, water and corn syrup to a boil over high heat. Cook until the sugar is dissolved. Continue cooking, without stirring, until it turns golden, about 8 minutes. Remove from the heat and whisk in the cream. It will boil up like crazy. Let cool for 1 minute, then stir in the bourbon. Bring the mixture to a boil over moderate heat and cook, stirring, for 1 minute. Let the caramel sauce cool.

5) To prepare the filling, in a small bowl, combine the brown sugar, cinnamon and pecans, reserving 4 tablespoons pecans.

6) To assemble the buns, butter two 9-inch cake pans and line with parchment paper, then butter the paper as well.

7) Turn the risen dough out onto a floured work surface and roll it into a rectangle that is 18 inches wide (the side nearest to you) and 12 or so inches long. Spread the dough with the softened butter using a knife or spatula. Sprinkle it with the brown sugar mixture.

8) Roll the dough into a tight, 18-inch long spiral. Using a sharp serrated knife, very, very gently saw the log into 1 1/2 inch sections; you should get 12. Don't press down with the knife or you'll squish the spirals.

9) Pour 1/2 cup of caramel in each cake pan and scatter with 2 of the reserved tablespoons of pecans in each pan. This is my rule with making stuff that has nuts in it: for allergy purposes, when I can, I always put some on top so people know what they're getting.

10) Arrange the buns in your cake pans. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise for 2 hours on the counter or refrigerate overnight (up to 16 hours).

11) To bake the buns, if they've been refrigerated, take your buns out of the fridge 30 minutes before you'd like to bake them, to allow them to warm up slightly. Heat your oven to 350 degrees. Bake your buns until they're puffed and golden (the internal temperature should read 190 degrees), 20-25 minutes.

12) Transfer pan to a cooling rack and let cool 5 minutes. Invert the pans onto the cooling rack. If any of the caramel gets trapped in bunless corners, just scrape it up while it's warm and spread it back on the inverted buns. Allow to cool for 5 more minutes. Serve warm.

Thief of Shadows Cherry Almond Scones

Thief of Shadows by Elizabeth Hoyt is one of my favorite romance novels ever. It ranks with Prince of Midnight in terms of sheer numbers of rereads and in a superficial way, it's a similar book. Our hero Winter Makepeace is also known as The Ghost of St. Giles, a Spiderman-like character who defends the weak and the poor in this very rough neighborhood of the Dickensian London setting. His alter ego is that of the "dour manager" of the Home for Unfortunate Infants and Foundling Children. However, while both S.T. Maitland and Winter Makepeace wear a mask and excel at swordplay, that's pretty much where the books diverge.

Unlike Leigh Strachan (the heroine of Prince of Midnight), Isabel Beckinhall is a wealthy widow ten years Winter's senior, secure in her femininity and her place in the world. She is calm and confident under pressure, unafraid to pursue her interests and an emotionally whole, capable human being who most definitely does not require rescuing from, well, almost anything. So when her patronage of the Home brings her into intimate contact with Winter, we find the traditional historical romance roles of the experienced, older rake and the young, virginal heroine quite thoroughly reversed.

In fact, Thief of Shadows manages the tension between historicity and feminism very well. Isabel is a widow (more freedom than your average virgin heroine), an heiress (no economic necessity for marriage), sterile (no reproductive necessity for marriage) and not shy or ashamed of her physical desires. However, when a secondary character is left unmarried and pregnant, she moves swiftly to protect that character from the consequences society would impose upon her. In this book, women routinely rescue each other and the heroine saves the hero several times over the course of the story. I don't think any argument can be made against it not being a feminist book and yet the circumstances keep it from feeling anachronistic. Still, our hero is allowed to be a hero within the context of a suspenseful and ultimately satisfyingly twisty sub-plot. Just not in the context of saving Isabel, which would be the much more standard trope.

Oh, and what a hero. I admit to having a fondness for virgin heroes in any context, but with Winter we also get Robin Hood/Zorro/Captain America super hero alpha qualities that are captivating in combination with his sexual innocence and strict moral code. It's easy to see why Isabel finds it so difficult not to lap him up. Which she does. And he does back. In the hottest possible ways.

Thief of Shadows is one book that has it all: a dreamy hero, a confident heroine, a plausible love story arc, a spirited sub-plot and super hot sex. Honestly, I think it's pretty much the perfect book.

When I write these reviews, I try to find a place in the story where the food involved becomes a memorable plot point. On practically the first page of the novel, Isabel rightfully blames warm scones for the impulse to volunteer, an action that brings her more directly into Winter's path. As a United Methodist used to being plied with food to volunteer for committees, this is a familiar concept to me. Isabel says:

Never volunteer. Not even when pleasantly filled with warm scones and hot tea. Warm scones were obviously the work of the devil or perhaps Lady Hero Reading, one of the two founding patronesses of the home. Lady Hero had refilled her teacup and looked at Isabel with guileless gray eyes, asking prettily if Isabel would mind meeting with Mr. Winter Makepeace, the home's dour manager, to look over the new building. And Isabel had blithely agreed like some scone-filled mindless cow.

And, of course, I knew they had to be cherry scones when Lady Penelope Chadwicke wrong-headedly brings hothouse cherries to the Home for Unfortunate Infants and Foundling Children during her frankly moronic attempt to replace Winter as the home's manager with a gentleman of greater social standing and more polished graces.

Though this recipe can't be in any way considered healthy, it does avoid two of the more persistent problems I have with commercial American scones: 1) it's not too sweet and 2) it doesn't leave that odd film on your teeth. I have no idea if these two things bother anyone else, but they bother me immensely, much like the failure to maintain the proper tension between historicity and modern feminist ideals in historical romance.

If cherries or almonds aren't your thing, they can certainly be replaced with three-quarters of a cup of nearly any fresh or frozen fruit (or half a cup dried) and the almond extract and sliced almonds can simply be omitted. If you're using the extract, I do recommend the sliced almonds as I like to give people a hint at the flavors contained in my baked goods.

And then you too can charm and cajole people into doing your bidding with warm baked goods.

Cream Scones with Cherries and Almonds
adapted from The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook
Makes 8
Prep time: 5 minutes
Total time: 40 minutes

2 cups all-purpose flour, plus extra for the pan and workspace
3 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
5 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into 1/4-inch cubes and chilled
3/4 cup fresh or frozen cherries, pitted, rinsed, drained and chopped
1 cup heavy cream
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
3 tablespoons sliced almonds

1. Adjust an oven rack to the middle position and heat the oven to 450 degrees. Pulse the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt together in a food processor to combine, about 6 pulses. Scatter the butter evenly over the top and pulse until mixture resembles coarse cornmeal with a few slightly larger butter lumps, about 12 pulses.

2. Add the cherries and quickly pulse once to combine. Transfer the dough to a large bowl. Stir in the cream and the almond extract with a rubber spatula until the dough begins to form, about 30 seconds.

3. Turn the dough and floury bits out onto a floured workspace and knead until it forms a rough, sticky ball, 5 to 10 seconds. Press the dough into a floured 9 inch cake pan (to ensure round edges). Unmold the dough and cut into 8 wedges. Place the wedges on an ungreased baking sheet prepared with parchment paper or silpat. Sprinkle tops with sliced almonds and press into dough to ensure they stick.

4. Bake until the scone tops are light brown, 12 to 15 minutes. Be very careful not to let the bottoms burn. Cool on a wire rack for at least 10 minutes. Serve warm or at room temperature with butter or and jam or better yet, clotted cream.