It’s a weeknight and Beloved is working late, which almost never happens. I’m in charge of making school lunches, which happens as seldom as I’m able to get away with, and I realize that we have no home-baked snacks. Beloved, who is usually in charge of lunches, has taken to heart my preference that we reduce our processed food consumption as much as possible, and pretty much every day, the boys have some sort of home-baked snack in their lunches.
Except, Beloved is away and we are out of cookies. This is a confluence of events I could not have foreseen in my wildest nightmares, let alone foreseeing it in the Bearpaw aisle when I did the groceries earlier this week. This is my comeuppance for being the uppity family that doesn’t rely on Oreos and Pirate cookies anymore. We don’t buy that kind of snack food BUT WE’RE OUT OF COOKIES on my lunch duty day.
As I’m poking through the cupboards thinking of sending them with crunchy lentil surprise (SURPRISE!), I come across three audaciously freckled bananas. Just this past weekend, I threw away the 352 frozen freckled bananas that we have been keeping stashed in the freezer in case the banana bread fairy were to drop by and find herself impelled to bake a loaf or seventy. Huh, I think. I could make banana bread.
So you might have noticed earlier that I made reference to Beloved doing the baking. I don’t bake. I will admit that over the last five years or so, I’ve turned into a confident, creative cook of the sort I did not even know existed within me five years ago. But baking, with its reliance on measuring and recipes and exactitude paying attention, has always eluded me. Beloved is a much better baker than I am. But it’s banana bread. How hard could it be? *insert ominous music here*
I find a decent recipe on Canadian Living, and run a comparison of the ingredient list to what we have in the pantry and we have a match. (Seriously, when did I become a person with a pantry sufficiently stocked that I can bake on a whim? Probably around the same time I became a person who bakes on a whim? Perhaps you might keep a watchful eye for other signs of the pending apocalypse.)
I’ve got the dry ingredients done when we develop a banana issue. Apparently three bananas fall far short of the required two cups. I look longingly at the now-empty banana hook, but additional ripe bananas fail to materialize. I figure the bananas are probably only adding flavour anyway, and I am not fond of an overly obnoxious banana taste, so I carry on with about 2/3 of the prescribed banana. In mixing the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients, the additional purpose of the bananas becomes clear: my batter has the consistency of, um, not batter. Something drier than batter, more like the houseplant that you forgot behind the shutter for a year. I cast one more longing glance at the empty banana hook, and then start rooting through the fridge thinking of banana alternatives. More eggs or milk will mess with the structure too much. What else do we have?
Cream cheese? Great for mashed potatoes, not so much for banana bread. Spicy adobe peppers? I’d actually eat that, but the kids’ mouths would burst into flames. I’m reaching for the sour cream and have to move the apple sauce out of the way when I realize – APPLE SAUCE! Substituting one mashed-up fruit for another seems like a decently plausible idea, and it vastly improves the texture of the batter.
It sure LOOKS like banana bread.
Beloved will be so surprised when he gets home from his meeting and he finds my first ever loaf of chocolate-chip banana bread a sink load of every dirty dish in the kitchen waiting for him!