©2008 Harry Kenney

How I came up with this dish has an odd little road to it. A couple months ago I had friends coming over for a get together and I had my cooking itineary planned, complete with an Italian dessert. No, not one of my own. I do do other people’s recipes at times too. Sometimes I make so many changes that they end up turning into something different and my own, but this was one of those times I was going to pretty much go along with the recipe I had. (At least that had been the initial plan.)

Listen up, this will teach you the value of reading something first, and all the way through and thoroughly. I was going to make this chocolate ricotta dessert (forget what, maybe was a cake, I seem to think it was going to be one of those custard things in ramekins. I had read the recipe throught and even did the two hour prep (again this was a while back, Iwrote down the recipe, but I didn’t write down this story, so bear with my fuzzy memory.)

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©2008 Harry Kenney

What we have here essentially is a Spanish Oxtail Stew featuring Root Vegetables. Not only is it a dish eaten in the south of Spain, but this is a dish that transcends not only geography, but also social classes and time itself. With a few variations this dish could have been eaten in close to this form not only a few hundred years ago, but also two thousand years ago, and even nine millennia ago. Talk about getting in touch with the earth and roots huh? So how did I decide to do this exact dish?

Having done so many Italian and Italian-American recipes lately I’ve felt a great need for change. And a desire to let my taste buds, if not my actual personage, travel to some different distant lands. It was an episode of Dinner: Impossible that got me interested in trying out oxtails. I find it in some ways humorous and in many ways delightful when poor people’s food or “peasant food” becomes trendy cuisine.

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©2008 Harry Kenney

If you enjoyed my very recent Chocolate-Raspberry Lava Cake recipe, then you are going to love this “makeover” or redeaux as well. Remember the original lava cake was made as a mistake. And this dish came about when I messed up my lava cake. So much for the saying two wrongs don’t make a right!

Think of it almost as a crunchy chocolate pudding “slash” cake. Obviously since it never leaves the dish it can’t “lava” out like the original. And as you see the cracking on top in the photo, you see why I had to call this chocolate cave-in cake.

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Lava cake, aka molton cake, aka volcano cake (hmm, I sense a theme here) … whatever you want to call it, it’s fun and delicious, rich though lighter than you would expect — a chocloholic’s dream. Women want it and want to run away from it at the same time (because they want it, you see.) Kids love it, so do guys. What’s not to love about a miniature chocolate cake that oozes out even more liquid chocolatey goodness when you cut in to it?

There seems to be two basic ways to make this cake. The way that’s most difficult (patterned on the original “mistake cake”) that can easily fail, and the way that guarantee’s success every time. Being one of these crazy people who actually expects things to behave the way they are supposed to be — you know, purchasing a watch with the expectation it tells time, a refrigerator that stays cold, crazy things like that — my version falls into the latter category.

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Sometimes you just want to have it all. And sometimes you can — especially when you’re cooking. And in this case, baking. How this recipe came along was simple: I had a couple of bananas, I wanted to use them to make some kind of sweet desert, preferrably something baked and I wanted it to include chocolate.

While it’s true with this basis there’s a hundred things I could choose to do, the first thing that popped to mind was maybe a banana cream pie. Graham cracker crust, chocolate pudding (some folks do vanilla), sliced bananas and whipped cream. Yummy but way too easy. No challenge in it.

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What do I always say? Buy new spices, different herbs, try things out!! You don’t have to do it all at once. A little at a time and build up your cooking aresenal. Now, all that is true. I’m not backing off of any of it; not in the slightest.

However — yes, the “big but” — you know sometimes you go through pages of a cookbook or you watch a cooking show and you just want to scream out: “Hey, buddy! We don’t all have every ingredient in the world like you do!!” That’s right, not every pantry or spice cabinet can have everything.

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