Upside down/Boy, you turn me

Pretty much anything can be turned into an upside-down cake. I've made fennel and cherry and pineapple, of course; rhubarb, too. I'm usually a banana bread-maker, but after a particularly tedious recipe from that huge, green Gourmet Today cookbook that called for sifting the cake flour (seriously?), I retreated to my old steady, Lucinda's Authentic Jamaican Kitchen. Lucinda's Jamaican Banana Cake recipe is spot-on. This woman gets around: she's also the author of Lucinda's Rustic Italian Kitchen.

To make any cake recipe an upside-down cake recipe, discard any instructions for a topping. These are the instructions:

1. Get a cast-iron skillet (10-inch pref.).
2. Pour sugar all over it, covered with pats of butter.
Alternately: Pour melted butter all over it and then douse with sugar.
Or even: Mix up softened butter and sugar in a bowl and then spackle it all over the pan.
3. Slice up your fruit and arrange it on the butter-sugar in a decorative pattern of your choosing. Concentric circles are truly fancy.

With bananas, they're going to brown if you leave them all exposed and sitting out like they're waiting at a bus station. Make your cake batter first; follow the recipe. Then: BANANATIME. Slice them, throw (i.e. gently place) them in the pan and top them with dollops of cake batter. The dollop bit is important. If you try to spread and smear your cake batter on top of the fruit, you will ruin your dainty handiwork. Dollop, and then gently even out the batter.

Throw (i.e. set) it in the oven at 300-325 degrees F until it smells really good.

I had some fancy bananas, so they came out yellow and purple. Thank God I happened to have a yellow-and-purple plate handy. (But I ended up eating 1/3 of it with my hand, anyway, so it's not like it had to look nice for company.)

Three years, three million calories

Maybe 3 million calories is a little hyperbolic. That would be 2,740 calories a day for the last three years. Sure, there have been some 2,740-calorie days—I'm one of those people who measures the success of a Thanksgiving dinner in sticks of butter—but, by and large, I'm your average girl. Your average Hudson Valley print journalist food columnist girl, who will pretty much eat anything and everything* in the name of newsprint: seared scallops, food-cart tacos, snake, eel, cricket, umeboshi, live clams, raw potatoes, Brussels sprouts and habaneros by the handful.

Dan Barton, editor and friend, began this blog in 2007 in response to a request to get my column, "Small Potatoes," up on the company website (Ulsterpublishing.com). I ended it abruptly in July 2007 when the column finally got put on the company website. I apologize to the 3-7 people who actually read it/noticed I stopped posting. I will make amends by offering the first reader to return to this blog three ice pops from Zora Dora Paletaria next summer, my treat. If you live on the West Coast, I will buy you a delicious microbrew; Malaysia, a crunchy scorpion on a stick.

Why should you trust me this time? Well, our company is working on a new website featuring links to writers' blogs and I'm conspicuously missing from the foodie list. I do eat, drink and participate in a great number of Hudson Valley food events, and not everything makes it into the column. Perhaps this will be a forum for those recipes, restaurant recommendations, seasonal produce scores, tips and tricks that never make it into print.

Speaking of: I am loving the TuthillHouse at the Mill Restaurant in Gardiner. Go, and order the osso buco. I'm planning to give all the delicious details in a forthcoming column.

Thanks for reading. See you soon—I promise.

Megan

*Not brains.