Surrendering onions

I've been away. I know. I have noticed. Thank you for your patience during the disruption to your service.

I've been terribly ill, you see. Sick, so sick. Morning sickness it is. Was. It's over now - sort of. I still get the odd billowing wave of it, bobbing up around my solar plexus but I'm no longer a drooping, greyish figure haunting my house. Urgh. I hate - hate - people who say that horrid thing to pregnant women - "You're not ill, you're pregnant." Really? Because it feels an awful lot like norovirus to me.

Anyway I feel better now. And I had my 12 week scan - just one spratling, thank god, in the right place - and so I can start moaning on about being pregnant again. The other thing that's happened is that I've finished putting together that book I was talking about. In the end it really wasn't very much work, it was just impossible to do anything feeling so sick. Ten minutes typing, 1 hour lying down, ten minutes typing, one hour lying down. SO SO SICK. I got some pills off my doctor, The Beast, in the end. I just couldn't take it anymore. But they only took the edge off, it wasn't like I was bouncing out of bed in the mornings.

I honestly am still reeling from how awful it was. It just wasn't that bad with Kitty. And I wasn't that tired either. But for the last six weeks I've been wiped out, asleep from 1-3pm every day. Wiped out like chalk on a blackboard. And then wake up feeling like shit. Poor old Kitty. Or rather lucky Kitty - she has eaten biscuits and watched telly solidly for six weeks. But thank god for telly. Thank GOD! What would we have done without it.

I am trying not to think too much about being plunged back into a babyhood. I am trying to look on the bright side. I must have learned something since Kitty was born. It surely won't be as awful as it was. I don't want to go mad again, I really don't.

It has to be different this time - for one, Kitty was brought home to a house that didn't have any children in it. It was a grown-up house, really quite spooky in a lot of ways - silent and strange and unfit for a baby. These days it has a chattering lunatic nearly-two-year-old in it, dropping crumbs and kicking balloons and watching telly and running from one end of the house to the other for no reason other than youthful high spirits. The changing mat now has its own room, rather than squatting on the kitchen table. The kitchen extension means that everyone can slob about in the kitchen, rather than me being at the stove, running out every ten seconds into the living room to make sure everyone's okay.

And maybe I'm different. Broken in, broken down. Resigned. Institutionalised. Used to that special sort of monotony you get with small children, so intense particularly in babies. My expectations from life are different now. I am surrendered, like onions.

Surrendering onions is a slow but pleasing task. It is what you do if you want very soft, aromatic, almost creamy onions (for an onion gravy for example, or a tangle alongside some sausages) and the trick is to cook them for a good 1.5-2 hours on the lowest heat on your smallest available burner.

You slice them into rings, reasonably thinly and scatter them in a pan with some oil - and butter, if you like. Then sprinkle over a generous pinch of salt and put a lid on and leave them. Do not turn the heat up and do not poke them about too much. Take the lid off if at any point the onions start to even think about sizzling. Towards the end of the cooking time, the onions will almost in a matter of seconds collapse into themselves - they will surrender. I can't help but think of motherhood like that. But not in a bad way.


 

How to get ahead in journalism

I spent almost all of my adult working life feeling like a fraud. I wanted to be a journalist because of a television series in the 80s called Press Gang, to which I was completely addicted. I wanted badly to be the Julia Sawalha character: brilliant, tough, uncompromising. I was a terribly unfriendly child, very angry, resistant to organised fun, terrified of humiliation - in this cold and unbending fictional telly character I saw how some of my unfortunate personality traits could be handy.

But it became very obvious very early in the postgraduate thingummy I did in journalism after leaving university, that I was never going to be a good journalist.

Please, by the way, do not laugh at me for having done a "course"; people do these things nowadays because it's so hard to get a job in newspapers. In fact, unless you are incredibly brilliant or insanely hard-working (with a private income), getting a job in journalism these days comes down to luck. When pompous parents tell me that their blobby children are "thinking about" going into journalism I laugh nastily and say "as if it's that easy".

Anyway, the course director declared to us on the first day that journalism is "not about writing. It is about information. It is about being nosy. It is about being a gossip. It is about always wanting to be the person who knows things first."

My heart sank. I am none of those things. I am terrific at keeping secrets and I'm always the last to know everything, I don't pry, I feel sorry for people and do not want to put them through the media mill even if they've done rotten things. I think pretty much everyone is entitled to a private life.

I struggled on, experiencing full-body cringes whenever I had to make awkward phone calls, hating every second of interviews, fighting with sub-editors over ultra-mean headlines to interviews with people I had thought were perfectly nice. I edited quotes so that interviewees wouldn't get into trouble.

Years ago, before the media was in such a terrible state, I probably would have been able to swing some sort of "mummy" column when I chucked in my job and smugly retreat home with purpose. But those gigs are few and far between these days. My husband has a friend who in the early 90s earned £80,000 from writing two weekly columns. £80,000!!! Those were the days.

I resigned myself to never making any money again, and took to the internet and here we are. The internet being, as it happens, the reason that newspapers and magazines are in the toilet. But you certainly can't beat the internet, so I joined it.

So much so that I threw open the doors of my home the other day to some of the editorial staff of a website called What's In My Handbag.

They wanted to photograph the contents of my handbag, focusing particularly on my make-up, which they would then use to do something or other. I don't really understand how it works. But I've always wanted someone to come round to my house and talk to me about make-up, so I screamed "YES!" when they emailed to ask if I wanted to do it.

Browsing their website the night before, I saw with rising panic that other handbag interviewees had prepared exciting banquets for the website's photo shoot staff, or at least plied them with exotic breakfast liquers.

It was a full week since my last Ocado order. I had no eggs, no milk, very little butter not at freezing temperature. It was 10.30pm and I had just returned from a night out, the remains beside me of a hastily-scoffed kebab from E-Mono, London's finest kebab house (I am not joking).

I suppressed a luscious burp. My mind started to race. These bitches would be expecting treats!! My mind first turned, as it always does, to in what ways I could throw money at the sitution. Could I beg my husband 10 minutes' grace in the morning while I ran up the road to Sainsbury's, bought 25 assorted pastries and then try to pass them off as being from an artisan bakery?!

No, think - think!!! I don't know how it came to me, but it did. Divine inspiration, or something, I don't know.

The answer was: flapjacks.

No flour, eggs or milk required. Some might say they are a thing that requires no actual cooking. But in that moment, they presented themselves not as a delirious cop-out, but as a lifesaver.

What I did happen to have, which made all the difference, was a box of extremely expensive posh museli from a company called Dorset Cereals, which are filled with all sorts of exciting nuts, grains, raisins and sultanas. I had only to bind the whole lot together with an appropriately enormous amount of melted butter and golden syrup.

I am not going to give you exact quantities for this, because flapjacks are, thank god, a thing you can basically do by guessing.

I got a square, loose-bottomed tin and filled it with museli to a depth I considered respectable for a flapjack (about 2in). Then I melted about 3/4 of a block of butter in a saucepan, added to that 3 generous tablespoon dollops of golden syrup and a big pinch of salt, poured in the museli and mixed it round.

Then at this point I, fatally, panicked and poured over a tin of condensed milk. I mean, the flapjacks were really delicious but the condensed milk made them fall apart in an annoying way and in actual fact, they were a bit too sweet. So leave the condensed milk out, if I were you. I also chopped up some chocolate and sprinkled it on the top, which probably wasn't neccessary.

After turning out the buttery rubble, (sorry that's all a bit Nigella isn't it), into the square tin, I patted it down with a spatula and shoved it in the oven for 20 minutes.

They worked incredibly well, even allowing for the condensed milk over-kill and the girls pretended to like them well enough, while marvelling at how quickly and efficiently I had filed the product descriptions for my chosen make-up.

What can I say? I should have been a journalist.

 

Banana bread. Again.

There is an American writer - dead now - called Richard Yates. You will know him because he wrote a book called Revolutionary Road, which was made into a film with Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslet a few years ago - 2007 I think, or 8.

Anyway he wrote loads of books and I read them all. That's not a boast, they're mostly very short. But I did also read his biography, which was really long. And then I wrote a very long piece, almost as long as the biography, for The Independent about him, which I think they still owe me my £90 fee for.

The thing about Richard Yates, the reason why you don't know his name as well as you know other big American writers, is that he was just really obsessed with his mother. In every single book he wrote, there she is. Irritating, mad, feckless, vain, selfish, shrill, talentless, deluded. In Revolutionary Road she appears as an estate agent and because that's the only book of his most people have read, they think nothing of it.

But she's there, in all the others, lurking. And when you read one Yates book after the other, it ends up seeming really quite mad. After the third or fourth book you get a horrible psycho "ehhr ehhr ehhr" tingly feeling, like if you were to walk into the bedroom of a friend and it was plastered with photographs of you.

So the reason that Yates never really made it, died alone and mad in a tiny dirty flat, despite being a really terrific writer, was that he was unable to tackle the big themes that make you properly famous; instead he zeroed in, time after time, on miserable little people leading miserable little lives, every book, every page, stalked by his unbearable mother. Revolutionary Road was a hit by accident, while obsessing about how much he hated Ma, Yates also - almost as a side-line - struck a chord with discombobulated middle America. But it was a fluke.

I fell to thinking about Richard Yates and his unwitting, untherapised obsession with his mother when I found myself, almost trance-like, making yet another type of banana bread. Considering I am trying to get material for a book, it seems so mental and obsesseive compulsive to keep making the same thing over and over again with no reason, no explanation.

Although I suppose there is an explanation. And that is, banana bread is fucking delicious.

This recipe I found on a card in Waitrose, and it was originally a banana, chocolate and caramel cake, using a tin of Carnation caramel, but I got home and didn't have any caramel but did have a tin of condensed milk, so I used that instead.

I know it's just banana bread and I know there are already about fifteen recipes for it on this blog and I probably belong in a nuthouse but this is really terrific, all the same.

Banana and Condensed Milk Bread
Makes a 1kg loaf

75g butter
25g caster sugar
1 large egg
1 397g can condensed milk
225g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
3 ripe bananas, mashed

Preheat your oven to 180c or 170c for fan ovens. Grease and line your 1kg loaf tin. You can get away with just lining the sides with one long strip of greaseproof paper, but you must grease the ends well.

1 Beat the butter and sugar together until pale and fluffy then add the egg - do not worry too much if this curdles -  followed by your can of condensed milk. Mix the flour and baking powder together and fold into the mixture.

2 Fold in the banana and then pour into the tin. You can decorate this, if you like, bearing in mind that it is going to rise quite significantly. I dotted a spine of walnut halves down the middle, which then heaved away to the left - like a hip tattoo on a pregnant woman.

3 Bake for 1 hr

Eat, then ring your shrink.



 

Poached chicken breast and its sauce for Laura*

Most diet plans and recipes featured in newspaper colour supplements and in magazines will at some point instruct you to eat a poached chicken breast. I am not averse to diet recipes but a poached chicken breast has always struck me as a terrible thing. Tasteless, papery, depressing.

But I have to lose some weight. I don't know how it happened, but I've got fatter. I don't recall eating more, or differently, but some cosmic shift has occurred to make me acquire more weight. I don't know how much because I don't weigh myself, but I know that a few months ago all my clothes fit and now they don't. Specifically certain pairs of jeans. Specifically round my middle. I would go on my own-brand Shitty Food Diet, but it has been failing me. I don't know why.

Things were made worse recently by going on holiday to a Greek island where among the guests were two 40-year-old women who were in terrific shape. They were lean and mean like Japanese calligraphy; they exercised all the time - running down to the beach at 7am to swim to a neighbouring island and back - and ate practically nothing. AND there was this 18 year old boy who had abs you could grate cheese on. He looked like he'd been Photoshopped. All round it was not a terrific week for feeling hot and sexy and whippet-like. And my hands swelled up so much in the heat that I had to stop wearing my wedding ring.

By the way, don't all rush to shriek that I am pregnant, because I am not - chance would be a fine thing. (Not quite as easy second time around, it seems.)

Anyway looking pregnant without actually being pregnant is the worst of both worlds. So I have been casting about for things to eat that won't make me get any fatter and thought that things may have got to such a drastic stage that I will have to give poached chicken breast a whirl.

The thing that made me definitely decide to do this was recalling an interview with Cheryl Cole about two years ago, when we were still in thrall to her and were not yet weary of her chocolatey eyes and perfect teeth and cavernous dimples, where she talked about losing a lot of weight. She would eat for dinner, she said, poached chicken breast (A-HA!) with "some kind of creamy sauce" and steamed vegetables.

The creamy sauce here is key - a rich creamy sauce will liven anything up, even a sodding chicken breast and you can, if you are doing a low-carbohydrate regime, as I am, slobber it all over whatever you're eating. It will just make everything okay.

Please do not be daunted by the sauce I have invented here. It is the same principle as Hollandaise but very easy as you are not required to do that awful buggery thing where you cook the egg-and-butter mixture only for it to fucking split and make you cry (this may only apply if you have PMT). What you sacrifice for ease and speed is a small amount in the way of consistency, which in the case of this sauce is a little thinner than an echt Hollandaise. But it is the key to being thin. So just do it.

Poached chicken with its sauce
For 2

2 chicken breasts
3 egg yolks
200g butter
a dash of vinegar
salt and pepper
juice of half a lemon
1 tsp of stock powder if you have it, don't worry if not


1 In a pan large enough to accommodate both chicken breasts heat up about two inches deep of water with your stock powder and bring to the boil. Turn down the heat until it is simmering and then add the chicken. Cook this for 12 minutes, turning occasionally. Try not to let the water hit a rolling boil, or dip below a brisk simmer.

2 If I were you, I would wait until the chicken was cooked then take it out of the pan to rest before you attempt the sauce because although the sauce is not hard, it is best to have no distractions while you are doing it.

(I made sure Kitty and husband were both watching television while doing this and not liable to pester me for biscuits, stickers, hugs or story-reading. Kitty can be pretty demanding, too.)

The chicken needs to rest for a bit anyway. Don't be put off by how utterly disgusting the chicken looks when cooked - all pale and dead-looking - this will be disguised later; see picture above.

3 For the sauce first melt the butter in a saucepan. If you have one of those marvellous pans with a little pouring lip, use that, if not don't worry. After it has melted keep it over the lowest flame possible to keep warm. Then separate the three yolks into a small bowl.

4 I have an electric whisk for this step. I'm sure you could do it by hand but it might be tough on the old wrists. So, while continuously beating the yolks, add the melted butter in a thin stream. People make a lot of fuss about how hard this is, it really isn't, just be careful.

5 Once add the butter has been added, season with salt, pepper, lemon juice and vinegar. Add all these cautiously and taste all the time. Egg yolks are precious; leftover egg whites are a bore - you do not want to have to do the whole thing all over again. I like a very vinegary Hollandaise - or should I say "Hollandaise" - but you might not.

6 You can just eat this now, or if you need to wait a bit while cooking some veg -  (I made a broccoli accompaniment *cries* by boiling some broccoli for 5 minutes then tossing in toasted sesame oil, soy sauce and sesame seeds) - then get any old pan, fill it 2 inches with water and then heat to skin temperature and keep it there, then place your "Hollandaise" in the water to keep it a sort of baby-bath temperature, which will stop it from going grainy. Stir every now and again anyway.

7 To serve! (And this is key, for morale) slice the chicken into what is know in the restuarant menu trade as "medallions" and lay out on the plate, slather generously with sauce, and also any accompanying boring vegetables.

Giles, to my total astonishment, declared this "the most delicious thing" I've ever cooked. I was stunned. He hasn't said that for ages. So there you go. Although just between you and me, I think he might have just been trying to be nice because I'm so fat and spotty at the moment.

Happy dieting! :(






N.B. I have not been posting because my publisher wants an absolutely terrifying amount of original copy and so I have been sitting in my room in front of my computer not posting anything because any new ideas I have must go into the book... but I haven't been writing any new copy either. What is wrong with me?


*This post is dedicated to a really terrific girl I know on Twitter, @lauraewelsh, who once said the funniest thing to me ever, which is that the greatest skill a parent can have is to eat an entire packet of crisps with their head in a cupboard. She is on a diet, too.

Lemon Ricotta Cookies

I do love my lemon, and I will not apologize. I like it strong and unabashedly tart, especially in desserts. So I decided to give this recipe by Giada a whirl -- lemon ricotta cookies. Now I've used ricotta cheese in desserts before, but never as part of a cookie batter, so I was anxious to try it out.

These cookies are fairly easy to assemble, just start by zesting and juicing some lemons.

Cream butter and sugar.

Add the eggs, cheese, lemon juice and zest.

Add in the dry ingredients (premix the dry ingredients together in a separate bowl first).

Drop onto a parchment lined cookie sheet with a #40 scoop (or about 2 tbls per cookie)

Bake about 15 minutes but watch them carefully, it is easy to burn the bottoms. When the edges just start to turn golden, they are done. 

Have your glaze (powdered sugar, lemon juice, lemon zest) ready to go. The cookies need to set on the cookie sheet for 20 minutes before they can be moved to a cooling rack, and this is the perfect time to glaze them, while they are still warm (the heat will help you spread the glaze more easily). Spoon on the zest, and use the back of the spoon to gently spread the glaze. Be careful, the cookies are delicate, you don't want to rip the tops.

The glaze needs about 2 hours to fully set before you can think about packaging them. I was very surprised by the texture of these cookies. They were almost pillow-like, soft and chewy, with a great lemon flavor.

You'll notice on the bottom, there are two ingredients that I put a range for rather than an absolute value. The first is the amount of sugar in the cookie batter. Giada's original recipe called for 2 cups, but I (and some other reviewers) thought this was too sweet) used 1.5 cups of sugar instead. I really wanted the lemon flavor to shine through, so I dialed down the sugar. I loved how mine turned out, but I am really picky about lemon-flavored desserts, the cookies might have more general appeal with 2 cups of sugar in the batter, I don't know.

The second range is the amount of zest in the glaze. I have doubled the glaze recipe, because the amount Giada called for was rather small, and the bulk of the lemon strength comes from the glaze so I didn't want to skimp on it. Keeping the proportions the same as Giada's glaze, this glaze recipe should call for the zest of 2 lemons. I liked the zest at this strength, some found her glaze proportions too lemony, so if you just want a nice hint of lemon, use 1 lemon worth of zest in the glaze instead of 2.

Also, for giggles, I tried these cookies with lime juice and zest instead of lemon, and sprinkled some toasted coconut on top. These were also quite good, and in retrospect, toasted coconut would be a fine addition to the lemon version as well. Just make sure to sprinkle the coconut on before the glaze sets, otherwise it won't stick.

All in all, I was quite pleased with how these lemon cookies turned out. I think they are a great choice for a lemon cookie, especially if you want something that tastes a little fancier. These would be a great cookie to serve with afternoon tea!

Lemon Ricotta Cookies

Ingredients

Cookies:

• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 stick unsalted butter, softened
• 1.5-2 cups sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 (15-ounce) container whole milk ricotta cheese
• 3 tablespoons lemon juice
• 1 lemon, zested

Glaze:

• 3 cups powdered sugar
• 6 tablespoons lemon juice
• 1 tbls vegetable oil
• 1-2 lemons, zested
• toasted coconut (optional)

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.
2. In a medium bowl combine the flour, baking powder, and salt. Set aside.
3. In the large bowl combine the butter and the sugar. Using an electric mixer beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes. 
4. Add the eggs, 1 at a time, beating until incorporated. 
5. Add the ricotta cheese, lemon juice, and lemon zest. Beat to combine. 
6. Stir in the dry ingredients.
7. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper. Spoon the dough (about 2 tablespoons for each cookie or a #40 scoop) onto the baking sheets. 
8. Bake for about 15 minutes, until slightly golden at the edges. 
9. Remove from the oven and let the cookies rest on the baking sheet for 20 minutes.
10. FOR GLAZE: Combine the powdered sugar, lemon juice, and lemon zest in a small bowl and stir until smooth. Spoon about 1/2-teaspoon onto each cookie and use the back of the spoon to gently spread. Sprinkle on toasted coconut if using.
11. Let the glaze harden for about 2 hours. Pack the cookies into a decorative container.

Zucchini Bread

I happened upon this recipe, which I modified slightly from Paula Deen, when I had an overabundance of zucchinis to consume from last year's farm share (more about farm shares in another post). It is a simple and tasty quickbread recipe that will yield 2-9x5" loaves, plenty to eat and share!

Start by grating some fresh zucchini. Then begin by combining ingredients. First, premix the dry ingredients (flour, salt, spices, baking soda and sugar) together. 

Then, in a separate bowl, combine the wet (oil, eggs, water, zucchini and lemon juice). 

Add the wet ingredients to the dry and mix (can do by hand) until well combined and moistened throughout. Then, fold in the nuts, if you are using them (I used pecans because that's what I had on hand -- yum). 

Bake in 2-9x5x3" loaf pans (otherwise known as "standard loaf pans" -- the 8x4" loaf pans are 1 lb pans) for about 60 minutes, until a tester comes out clean.

A note about the sugar: I've made this bread using a variety of sugar amounts, from 1 cup to 3 cups. It depends on what taste you are going for. 1 cup of sugar is hardly sweet at all, and would pair well with a glaze or icing. 2 cups is moderately sweet, and 3 (what the original recipe called for) is very sweet, like a zucchini pound cake. I personally like 2 cups the best, half brown and half white, but that is my tastebuds. My husband prefers the 1 cup version. Don't be afraid to experiment.

I like this recipe for several reasons: 1) It's tasty; 2) It's easy; 3) it keeps well; 4) It yields 2 loaves, which means it is plenty to feed a crowd; 5) It's different, I've found that people still are surprised when you tell them that you've baked zucchini into a sweet bread. It is also a fantastic way to use up excess zucchini, especially if you have a lot of it (it is always plentiful in the summer, especially if you have a garden or participate in a farm share). I'm fairly certain you could bake the same exact bread with the yellow variety of summer squash, as its texture and taste are roughly equivalent, but I've never personally tried it.

Having said that, I do have to be honest and say that I'm not sure if I would go out of my way to make this bread if I didn't have excess zucchini on hand…but this bread also makes a great base for other types of quickbread (I added apples instead of zucchinis in a previous post, and it was a yummy autumn treat). So if you have excess zucchini, or if you just want to try your hand at zucchini bread, this is a great recipe. And if you want to use it as a base for another type of quickbread, have fun experimenting and be sure to tell me how it turns out!

Zucchini Bread

Ingredients

• 3 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
• 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1 cup vegetable oil
• 4 eggs, beaten
• 1/3 cup water
• 2 cups grated zucchini
• 1 teaspoon lemon juice
• 1 cup chopped walnuts or pecans

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. 
2. In a large bowl, combine flour, salt, nutmeg, baking soda, cinnamon and sugar.
3. In a separate bowl, combine oil, eggs, water, zucchini and lemon juice. 
4. Mix wet ingredients into dry, add nuts and fold in. 
5. Bake in 2 standard loaf pans (9x5x3"), sprayed with nonstick spray, for 1 hour, or until a tester comes out clean.
1. Alternately, bake in 5 mini loaf pans for about 45 minutes.

Banana Bread

I have always been on the lookout for a definitive banana bread recipe, and I've finally found it in the form of my friend Lauren's MIL's recipe (which I have since learned is the banana bread recipe from the 1970 Betty Crocker's Cookbook (the red one with the wheel of food on the cover). It's not what I normally think of when I think of banana bread -- that is to say a slightly spicy bread filled with nuts. In contrast, it is pale, white, devoid of spice (although you can certainly add spice in), and also devoid of mix-ins (which again, you can always add back in). It also has, to my thinking, a lot of baking powder in it, and I was expecting there to be an aftertaste. But I tried the recipe because I trust my friend Lauren's opinion since she too is an avid baker. And to my great surprise, I preferred this recipe of plain banana bread to any other that I've tried yet, and I think you will too. It is fluffy and pure, with a banana taste that hits you right in the face.

I've made this bread plain, with chocolate chips, and with cinnamon and pecans, and that is the order of my preference -- plain, chocolate chip, and then nuts/spice. I'd highly recommend making it plain the first time you try it, and then you can always change it up later if your tastebuds want something extra.

But first, because I've missed writing them, a brief banana interlude. Skip down to ignore my rambling and get right to the recipe!

Bananas are native to Southeast Asia, and have been cultivated for at least the last 5000 years, if not longer! They didn't start becoming popular in the United States until after the Civil War, and it wasn't until 1933 that the first recipe for banana bread appeared in an American cookbook (Balanced Recipes by Pillsbury). Coincidentally, the appearance of this first banana quickbread recipe coincides with a marked rise in the use of the chemical leavening agents baking powder and baking soda in America in the 1930's (get it -- "rise"? I crack myself up).

Little known fact: bananas are actually slightly radioactive due to their high potassium content. They contain small amounts of the isotope potassium-40, which has a half-life of 1.25 billion years! One banana does not have an appreciable amount of radiation, a trace amount when eaten that has been termed the Banana Equivalent Dose, or BED. But, a whole truckload of bananas actually has enough radiation to trigger false alarms by the Radiation Portal Monitors (RPMs) that screen goods coming into US land and sea ports (http://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/radiological-nuclear-detection-devices/)!

Today, virtually all sweet bananas sold (as opposed to plantains) are of the Cavendish variety, but currently that variety is under threat of being damaged by a brand-new strain (Tropical Race 4; TR4) of a soil fungal infection called Panama Disease. A different strain of Panama Disease, Race 1, all but destroyed the previous large-scale banana cultivar, Gros Michel, in the 1950's. Blights on banana crops have such stunningly devastating effects because cultivated bananas are in fact sterile -- they produce no seeds. They are not crossed and bred like other crops to maintain genetic diversity, with the result that all Cavendish bananas are essentially clones with identical genetic material -- which means they are all equally susceptible to TR4.  It is estimated that in anywhere from 5-20 years, TR4 will reach South America and permanently cripple the Cavendish banana supply. Worse, unlike the situation in the 50's where Cavendish stepped up after the demise of Gros Michel, there is currently no viable Cavendish replacement for large-scale banana cultivation. Other variants that exist are so far away from what you and I would consider the "typical banana" that most people would consider these alternate variants to not even be bananas!

Back to the baking!

I apologize for the pictures, when I gathered up the photos I had in hand, I realized that some of them are from the time I tried the recipe plain, some are from when I added chocolate chips, while others are from the time I tried adding nuts. So the pics are sort of all over the place, if you are wondering why one pic might have chips while the next pic is of plain bread…

This recipe is so easy, I almost can't stand it. First, mash up the bananas, the riper they are, the better (a fork works great for this).

Then, combine the bananas with all the other ingredients, and mix until moistened (about 30 seconds in a stand mixer).

Pour into a 9x5" loaf pan (I used the Pam baking spray with flour in it to coat the pan first, or you can do the traditional grease and flour), and bake at 350F for 55-65 minutes until the top of the bread is golden, and a tester is clean.

I can't say enough good things about this bread. It is simple, easy, and tastes fantastic even without anything in it -- in fact I prefer it plain, which is unusual for me! But you can easily use this recipe as a base and customize it with nuts and spices, or chocolate chips; I've tried both of those variations as well and they are both yummy!

Banana Bread

 Ingredients 

• 2 1/4 cups flour
• 1 cup sugar
• 3 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 3 Tablespoons vegetable or canola oil
• 3/4 cup milk
• 1 cup mashed very ripe banana (2-3 bananas)
• 1 egg
• optional mix-ins: 1C of nuts or chocolate chips
• optional spice: 1 tsp cinnamon

Directions

1.  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
2. Grease and flour your loaf pan.
3. Beat the mixture for 30 seconds on medium speed (the great part of the recipe is that you don't have to cream anything or do any step-wise additions; just dump all the ingredients into the bowl and mix).
4. Pour into a 9-5" loaf pan.
5. Bake 55-65 minutes until tester comes out clean