I am feeling a little under the weather at the moment, and so this post about the strawberry-rhubarb tartlets I made from a recipe on Delicious:Days is not going to get the attention it deserves. They were very good and just about the right size so that there was always room for one more. My biggest complaint would be that my puff pastry didn’t quite puff. Even after the custard was cooked through, the bottom of the tart was still dense and a little undercooked. Next time, I would blind bake the shells for about five or ten minutes before filling them.

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A lot of my impromptu meals involve rummaging through the fridge for various vegetables and throwing them in a soup. This one was supposed to be a classier version of cream of mushroom without the cream, and although you wouldn’t mistake the one for the other, I thought it was pretty successful. The trick is the immersion blender, which makes just about any soup fancier. It has a little milk to even out the brothiness, but the mushrooms are thick and smooth enough that no cream is needed.

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Poor bananas. I imagine that they thought they had finally been given to a good home. They must have been so happy. They didn’t know that they were going to be knocked around, that they would get a series of bruises that wouldn’t heal, and then be the victims of neglect. The best thing, I decided, would be to put them out of their misery.

Luckily, the recipe for Banana Bread from Cook’s Illustrated, via Leite’s Culinaria, called for three bananas, which was the exact number of my abused fruit. I had almost everything else on hand too, and the recipe was so simple that I don’t even have notes. Even the cooking time was right: a toothpick came out of the bread clean after exactly fifty five minutes. The loaf slipped easily out of the pan and sliced perfectly into moist, dense, bananany goodness.