Banana bread

This blog has yet to showcase one of my favorite things to do in the kitchen: baking. I love making bread, cookies, brownies, tarts, whatever. I love that you can basically do chemistry and get delicious food out of it. Or, as this apron puts it:

Do you ever forget about bananas for a while, and they end up looking like this?

If so, you shouldn't throw them out, you should make banana bread! Once bananas reach this point of brownness, they are bursting with banana flavor and sweetness, and they are basically mush anyway, so you don't need to work hard to make them into mush to make the batter.

This recipe makes 2 loaves of banana bread, so you have a few options once they're done. If you feel like you have more willpower than I do, you can wrap one up and freeze it for later. Or, if you're like me, you can leave them both out and devour them in a matter of days, before they get a chance to go stale. Your choice.

Banana Bread

2 1/2 cups flour (if you want, you can use whole wheat flour, or a mix of whole wheat and all purpose)
1 tsp salt
2 tsp baking soda
1/8 tsp cinnamon
1 cup butter (softened in the microwave for about 10 seconds, so it's soft but not melted)
2 cups sugar
2 cups mashed bananas (for me, it usually takes about 4 bananas, but it definitely depends on the size of your bananas)
4 eggs, slightly beaten
1 1/2 cup chocolate chips

Preheat your oven to 350. Butter and flour 2 loaf pans. You do this by spreading a thin layer of butter over every surface of the pan that the batter will come in contact in (this means the corners, the edges, everything). Then you take a large pinch of flour and shake it around so that it sticks to all of the greasy parts of the pan (this is always where you can see what part of the pan you missed with the butter). Any extra flour left kicking around in your pans can be put back in the bag (or just dumped in the batter, it doesn't really matter).

In a large bowl (and I mean a large bowl. Use the biggest one you have), mash the bananas with a fork. Depending on their ripeness, this could be pretty easy, or require more effort. Once those mare mashed to a nice mush, add the sugar, butter, and eggs. Mix this all together as well as you can.

Now comes the time where I have to introduce the most important rule of baking (well cooking in general, but baking more often than not): DON'T PANIC! Things will usually look kinda funky in the intermediate steps between start and finish, but you should never think you've messed up. You can always salvage mistakes you make, and most of time it's actually supposed to look like that. For example, at this point in the recipe, my batter looked like this:

It's all lumpy and kinda looks like snot, but that's fine. You haven't made a horrible mistake, it's supposed to look like this (or maybe not, but this is how mine always looks. Maybe a professional baker can make banana bread batter look appetizing, but I can't). So now we move on to the next step, adding the dry ingredients.

Add all the flour, salt, baking powder, and cinnamon to your current mushy batter. This is another point where you might think something has gone horribly wrong. It will look like you have put in way too much flour, but that is actually the right amount of flour. All the liquid in the bananas and eggs and stuff will soak up that flour in a jiffy. Now, once you add the flour, you don't want to stir it too much. Obviously you want to get everything mixed together, but if you stir the batter with the flour in it for too long, it will get tough when you cook it. So just mix it until it looks kind of homogenous (it will still be lumpy, but that's ok, banana bread batter is allowed to be lumpy).

Now the final step with the batter is to stir in the chocolate chips. After this step, your batter should look like this:

Now, you take this batter and pour it into your prepped loaf pans. Try to split it in half as evenly as possible, but some variation isn't going to ruin it.

Put these pans side by side on the same rack in the preheated oven for 70-80 minutes. This doesn't, however, mean that you get to put the pans in the oven and then leave for the gym for a hour or whatever. You should check the loaves about halfway through the baking process and see if they're baking evenly (well, really they'll just look like pans of batter, but it's good to check). Also, at this point, you'll want to rotate the pans. Ovens always heat unevenly, and you don't want one side of one of your loaves to be cooked and the rest of them uncooked. So you should shuffle them around in the oven. Take the pan that was on the left and put it on the right, and vice versa. Also rotate the pans so that what was the front is now the back.

Once you rotate them, let them cook until they're done. You can tell when they're done by sticking a knife or a toothpick into the center of a loaf and pulling it out. If it comes out clean, it's done. It it comes out with batter stuck to it, it's not done, and you can put it in for like 10 more minutes (it's ok if there's melted chocolate on the knife. That's inevitable).

Now comes the hard part. You should really let the banana bread rest for like 10 minutes before you try to get it out of the pan and eat it. I know it looks and smells delicious, but trust me, it will be so much better to wait.

And for a serving suggestion, try spreading nutella (store-bought or homemade) over a thick slice (this may seem like overkill, since it already has chocolate chips in it, but I don't care, it's delicious).

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Today, I'm going to tell you about something that I've always been interested in, but let fall by the wayside until recently: poetry. I love poetry, but for some reason I haven't been reading it too much recently.

This changed when I saw the movie Midnight in Paris (which, on a sidenote, is a cute movie, and Owen Wilson does a fantastic job of channeling Woody Allen's nebbish character). In this movie, the main character briefly meets T S Eliot, and gushes about how much he like Prufrock, which reminded me that I wanted to check out The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. And when I finally did, I was not disappointed. There is a reason it is a classic of the modern age. His portrayal of love and life and the world is so realistic but also so beautiful, you can't help but get sucked into the world he creates. And in amongst this beautiful portrayal of love and life, he has this lingering self doubt ("Do I dare/Disturb the universe?). I think anyone who reads this poem could find something that resonates with them in it.

Another poet that comes to mind when I think of Eliot is W H Auden (I'm not sure why I think of him, but I do. It's like how my mind associates Hemingway and Melville. But I digress). My favorite poem of Auden's is As I Walked Out One Evening. It, too, deals with love, but in a more detached way. Auden describes lovers sitting down by the river, professing their love forever. However, Auden points out that forever is a very, very, VERY long time, and they are making promises that they cannot keep. A pair of stanzas that sum up the feel of the poem perfectly are:

The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
O let not time deceive you,
You cannot conquer time.

Auden understands that human love cannot outlast forever, because forever will outlast all of humanity's existence. Everything we know will fall apart before time ends. And while this may seem like a bleak view, it is told in such a beautiful way, you just have to agree with it (also, it's true).

So go find some poems that you love, and curl up and enjoy the beauty our language can produce.