About a couple weeks ago, Anthony and I had to go to California to visit a sick aunt of mine. Staying at my sister's house in North Hollywood, I decided it would be nice to cook breakfast for her family as a token of our appreciation. I decided on making French toast (I mean, who would turn down French toast? Let alone made by someone else?). She had very few ingredients at hand and, as a result, I had to make do with what was around. Looking around her kitchen I noticed that she had quite a number of bananas and decided to work them into the recipe.
Besides omelettes, French toast is one of my favorite things to make for breakfast. It's simple and tasty and makes an excellent presentation with powdered sugar and fresh fruit. My favorite way to serve it is to slice up strawberries and fan them out on top of the French toast, lightly dusted with a layer of confectioner's sugar. It's very pretty and very simple. Other variations exist, each one of them elegant and savory in their own right.
Some breads work better than others when making French toast, if only for the way they maintain their structural integrity and don't turn instantly to mush when they come into contact with liquid of any kind. I would recommend using a nice sturdy sourdough or your standard French bread.
Note that this dish does contain eggs and milk. As such, lactose-intolerant and vegetarian/vegan/people who don't eat meat people beware.
what you'll need:
what to do:
- In a large bowl, scramble eggs and combine with milk. Add granulated sugar, vanilla extract, nutmeg and cinnamon. Set aside.
- Slice banana length-wise and cut each half into five segments, roughly one-inch each. This will produce ten banana pieces.
- Cut bread in half, diagonally, keeping each pair of bread halves together.
- Sandwich a piece of banana between two corresponding halves of bread. Submerge this "banana half-sandwich" in the egg mixture, making sure that the two pieces of bread stick together in some way (adding a little bit of pressure to form a kind of seal may help). This may require flipping the sandwich and redunking in the egg mixture. It should be fairly saturated but not so much that it becomes a soppy mess that can no longer be picked up.
- In a large frying pan, melt some butter over low-medium heat.
- Fry up the french toast in the melted butter until golden, carefully flipping it to cook the other side. This may take a couple minutes before and after flipping. When it is done, set aside on a plate covered with a paper towel to drain of excess butter.
- Continue for the other nine. You may have to add more butter from time to time to keep the pan well-lubricated and to keep the french toast from burning.
- Sprinkle powdered sugar or drizzle syrup over each serving (two pieces per person). Top with slices of banana if you got some more. This recipe should feed 5. Enjoy.