Brown Sugar Bourbon Sundaes

Oh, and there's maple glazed pecans, too. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

It was beautiful weather today here in Dallas, the perfect day to attend the St. Patrick's Day Parade on Greenville, so naturally, we took our antisocial selves to Highland Park Pharmacy for breakfast. We ate bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches on English muffins. We also split a strawberry shake to-go, because it seemed like it might be a little too my-boyfriend-broke-up-with-me-and-I'm-watching-only-Bridget-Jones-movies of us to drink the shake at the counter at 10:00am when we were the only patrons in the place and even the lone waitress kept nervously sidling away from us. This is us eating at the counter. Alone. 

But I digress. We then decided, at breakfast, that we should have hot dogs and corn on the cob for dinner, because it felt like summer outside, and we wanted to feel easy and breezy. The hot dogs were good, but the corn was the main event. It was a chili lime roasted corn on the cob and the recipe is up on Alyssia's website. Instead of drinking this down with a soda like we were doing LAST spring, we went with a local kombucha made here in Tejas. It's a good probiotic drink that satisfies the need for something fizzy without cooking your organs from the inside out, or whatever it is Diet Coke allegedly does to you. 

For dessert, we decided to improvise off of a Bon Appetit recipe. Mason jars went into the freezer to chill. Bananas were sliced. Pecans were mixed with maple syrup. Rum and bourbon were procured from under the bathroom sink. It is a huge anxiety trigger that we might have alcohol out on display at our house, and even though it's only even been used for cooking or baking, one or both of our parents could come to dinner and see the alcohol and think we are hosting a speakeasy in our bathroom and drinking all the livelong day. This scenario seems infinitely worse than when maintenance came to fix one of our sinks and when we came home, the bottle of rum was sitting on the bathroom counter as a sort of silent "Get ahold of yourselves" message to us. This was the final product of the dessert. Remember that you might be wearing fancy clothes, so keep your mouth closed, lest you drool on yourself over this picture.

See? NSFW. Here's ye olde recipe. We gobbled it down in 6 bites, tops, but the itty bitty mason jars are the perfect way to serve them. If you wanted to be generous, you could use this recipe to make 4 servings and share them with a friend or a family member who's having a bad day. Or eat all 4 and still feel perfectly satisfied with your life.

Brown Sugar Bourbon Banana Sundaes with Maple Glazed Pecans

Ingredients:

3/4 cup Bourbon or Rum (I had a little of both and mixed them)

3/4 cup packed brown sugar

3 tbsp butter

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

2 ripe bananas, sliced however you want 'em

1 cup chopped pecans

1/4 cup maple syrup

pinch of sea salt

Directions:

Let's start with the pecans. Heat the oven to 350. Line a baking sheet with foil and spray with nonstick cooking spray. Do not skip the spray or you will be prying these pecans off the pan all night to no avail. Toss the pecans in the maple syrup, add that pinch of salt, and spread out evenly on the pan. Place on a nearly-top rack and roast them for 10-15 minutes. The maple syrup will bubble up around the pecans, so stir them around halfway through if you must, but you don't have to.

Pour Bourbon/Rum (Bum?) into a saucepan, add brown sugar, butter, and vanilla extract and bring to a boil. Don't shake the pan or else it might catch on fire, depending on what kind of stovetop you're using. Just like...avoid a fire. Let it bubble up for about 2 minutes, then turn the heat off and stir to make sure the sugar is dissolved. Then add back on to medium heat and simmer for 2 more minutes or so, until the sauce starts to thicken. Throw in the bananas. Don't be gentle. The threat of a fire is over now. Cook the bananas for an additional 2 minutes (we have no idea if it was 2 minutes at a time. We just know it wasn't 5 minutes, because 5 minutes is too long for any one step to last. It could, however, be up to 4 minutes). Scoop some ice cream into the mason jars that were chilling in your freezer. We used Coconut Bliss Vanilla Island ice cream, but any flavor you've got will do. Chocolate might be nice. Two scoops of ice cream should do it, then pour in the bananas and the sauce. Take the pecans out of the oven and sprinkle the pieces on top of the sundaes. Start eating it immediately and don't stop until you're trying to make your tongue a giraffe tongue to lick out the last bits of sauce. Then you've gone too far.

Who We B

We B the Birnbaums.

If you know us, chances are you have heard us extol the many virtues of the latest pop-up food joint that we've visited 4 times in 3 days, or at the very least, you've shared a delicious meal with us. We are only human, and we can't have a meal with everyone, mostly because we have sudden and crippling social anxiety attacks. We are safe here behind our computer screen.

The idea for this blog came about the other night in one of our many egotistical, Mexican coke (the soda, not the drug)-fueled rants, as we sat in a newly opened restaurant, telling ourselves that we can TOTALLY  be like Robert Irvine on Restaurant: Impossible and go into restaurants and be like, “this pasta sauce is tasteless and 40% of your staff has body odor, so let’s do this on a shockingly small budget, re-upholster your booths, paint the walls, and fix the menu!” After googling “how to become restaurant critics” and realizing we didn’t have the time or the ADHD medications to handle that, we settled on writing this blog.

Please bear with us, because the pressure to be the voice of our generation's food scene is a heavy burden to bear. For now, it’s a great way for us to let local shop owners and vendors know what we’re thinking when we eat there, and to keep in touch with our mostly out of town family, and perhaps remind them why they should be happy we don’t live near them.

Prease to enjoy the food and lifestyle witticisms of a half painfully white, half Japanese woman and her distinguished (read: elderly) Jewish husband.