It is a struggle for me to get the recycling out in time each week. The dire warning from the town clearly states the necessity to have it out by the curb by 7:00 AM on Mondays. I am up at six most mornings, a combination of Mr. Friday’s ridiculously early office hours and Luke the wonder dog, who just can’t wait to get up every day. And yet, most Mondays I dawdle around, reading the paper, checking Facebook, drinking the first Diet Coke of the day, looking out the window and counting daffodil blooms. And then, suddenly, I remember, and I am running down the driveway in my jim-jams, racing with an unwieldy recycling container loaded to the gills with cheap white wine empties, a collection of rattling Diet Coke cans, and lots of heavy newspaper, just a couple of houses ahead of the approaching recycling truck. I procrastinate. I could just take the recycling out the night before. But where would the fun and peril be in that?
I am always reading food articles, of course, and I fall prey to the ones that exhort us to eat better. Imagine that. Bananas are miracle food! Eat two bananas a day and shed pounds and become happier! Eat fifty a day for life-altering miracles! Reduce your risk of high blood pressure! Or stroke! Or cancer! Gluten-free! https://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-christianson/bananas-health_b_7798580.html
Bananas do contain all sorts of healthy ingredients: flavonoids, ply-phenolics, lutein, beta and alpha carotenes, antioxidant, lots of Vitamin C, potassium, Vitamin B6, fiber, magnesium and copper. But I don’t think that’s why we buy them. We buy them because they are yellow. Bananas smell great – like lunch boxes on a rainy day, with no hope of recess, in elementary school. Bananas are portable. Bananas are fun to peel. They are much easier to open than milk containers or anything in a plastic clamshell. Bananas are deelish.
But after a couple of days you forget that there is a bunch of bananas in the bowl on the counter, over there, way across the kitchen, over by the toaster and the stack of neglected Visa bills. And suddenly, you realize that you have procrastinated and waited too long and soon the fruit flies will start to swarm. And now you need to make a loaf of banana bread, because throwing food away is a sin. This is a salvageable crisis. And one with many solutions. And you can still wear your jim-jams without the recycling guys sniggering at you.
Basic Boozy Banana Bread
3 to 4 overly ripe, brownish bananas, smashed
1/3 cup melted butter
3/4 to 1 cup light brown sugar – it depends on your sweet tooth
1 egg, beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 tablespoon bourbon (or rum)
1 teaspoon baking soda
Pinch of salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
Up to 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
Pinch of ground cloves
1 1/2 cups flour
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Mix butter into the mashed bananas in a large mixing bowl. Add sugar, egg, vanilla and bourbon (or rum), and then the spices. Sprinkle the baking soda and salt over the mixture and mix in. Add the flour last, stir. Pour mixture into a buttered 4×8 inch loaf pan. Bake for 50 minutes to one hour, or until a toothpick comes out clean. Cool on a rack. Remove from pan and slice to serve. Do not delay. Yumsters.
https://food52.com/recipes/10424-banana-bread
https://www.justataste.com/ultimate-moist-banana-bread-recipe/
https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/8464-banana-chocolate-chip-tea-cake
“Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.”
-Groucho Marx
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