Baking on December 16

            I tried to follow Jody's  recipe.  I really did.

            But my heart was not into baking today.  As I measured and stirred, I kept thinking about great beginnings for an essay on baking banana bread.  I’d rather write about baking than actually do it.  In fact, I’d rather write about most anything than do it except for music and something else I vaguely remember from the  past . . . 

            Oh!  But back to baking.  I went to the grocery store specifically to get chocolate chips, laundry detergent, and toilet bowl cleaner, and I even came back with all three items.  You will be glad to know that the detergent and cleaner are intended for purposes other than baking.

            I was pretty tired from walking the dogs after going to the store and just wanted to sit down, so I attempted to assemble the ingredients at the kitchen table where I would theoretically sit to measure and mix.  For every time I sat down, I got up to get something I had forgotten.  Finally, I gave up and stood.

            I only spilled dough on Jody’s recipe once.  I am really hoping this banana bread turns out to be a favorite recipe now that I’ve christened its page in My Favorite Recipes.

            Assembling and measuring the ingredients yielded a few surprises.  I had just enough unbleached flour on hand.  It was a good sign that the nutmeg smelled like nutmeg and the cinnamon smelled like cinnamon—both evidence that my plan to replace all the 30-year-old spices is at work.  But the brown sugar—I had forgotten that my brother borrowed it last week to make his famous oatmeal cookies (check out the Quaker Oats box but leave out the raisins), and I did not want to have to walk all the way across the yard to his house.  Fortunately, there was a near-empty bag of brown sugar in the old coffee tin.  It came out of the bag in clumps, so I didn’t measure it too exactly, and once I had added the other dry ingredients, I had to pick up large flour-covered chunks of brown sugar and squish them with my fingers.  I hope that plain old iodized salt works as well as sea salt and that the vegetable oil was still okay.  (I did have fresh olive oil on hand but decided to use the somewhat post-dated canola oil instead.)  I didn’t forget the baking powder or the milk or the egg.  But instead of three, I only had two bananas—the other four I had hoped to use were black and soft enough that I didn’t dare try to pour them (I mean, peel them).

            The chocolate chips deserve their own paragraph.  Jody’s recipe calls for “2 handfuls.”  Recognizing that hands come in different sizes and that my hands are probably on the small size, I used two heaping handfuls.  

            Always a stickler for details, I was sure to use a large wooden spoon, just like the recipe said.  And I used two 9-inch bread pans even though one pan would have easily held all the dough.  The effort of stirring nearly put my arm out of commission, but I persevered as the oven slowly, very slowly, preheated.

            I set the timer and hurried to my computer to write about this baking event, but I had already forgotten all the witty first lines that had been running through my head as I assembled, measured, and stirred.  With the kitchen timer set, I am waiting for 47 minutes to go by.  Then I will have to wait another hour for the loaves to cool before I can find out how it all turned out.

            It’s a good thing that I just got up to check on the bread.  It was done a full eleven minutes early.  I still have hope that eating it will be better than writing about eating it.

            Later:  yes!  Add eating banana-chocolate chip bread to my preferred activity list.  But I’d still rather write about baking than doing it.