Tuesday Night Fun Cooking! Bananananana bread with Oma edition

Wow, you guys, it's amazing what a couple good nights' sleep will do for a person. I have also been on a couple of nice long (for me) runs and just feel better all around. I still need motivation to find direction in my professional life, but that's just par for the course when summer starts.

Let's start this episode of TNFC with a poem, shall we? This one is by Jack Prelutsky:

We're forty performing bananas,
in bright yellow slippery skins,
our features are rather appealing,
though we've neither shoulders nor chins,
we cha-cha, fandango, and tango,
we kick and we skip and we hop,
while half of us belt out a ballad,
the rest of us spin like a top.

We're forty performing bananas,
we mambo, we samba, we waltz,
we dangle and swing from the ceiling,
then turn very slick somersaults,
people drive here in bunches to see us,
our splits earn us worldly renown,
we're forty performing bananas,
come see us when you are in town.

Anya reads through the recipe. Daniel struggles to listen.

My parents (aka Oma and Opa) were in town over the holiday weekend, so we decided to move Tuesday Night Fun Cooking! to Monday and make banana bread. It was nice having another adult running the show so I could get pictures. I only got a few photos snapped with my phone, but there are also a couple short videos on IG of the kids practicing measuring stuff with a teaspoon. It's a real skill, I tell ya.

Daniel likes chopping. It must feel important and grown-up to wield a real knife. The one he's using below my dad gave us, and it's a real bona fide small-size chef's knife. It's very sharp and actually cuts things without a whole lot of effort, which makes it safer to use, I think, than dull or serrated knives.

Both kids really like mashing bananas. Or anything, really. There was no question that these particular bananas were more than sufficiently mashed.

While the banana bread baked, I was getting our actual dinner made, and then I didn't get any pictures of the final product. That's OK because the end result was...subpar. I insisted on including some leftover 10-grain cereal in the bread, we didn't have yogurt so we made buttermilk with regular milk and vinegar and then it baked a little too long, so the bread turned out a bit wet and dense in the middle and tough on the outside. I've had great success with this recipe before, though, so I think if you just follow the recipe and don't mess with it or let it bake 20 minutes too long, you'll end up with something better than I did!

Banana Bread (from the King Arthur Flour Baking Book)

• 2 large eggs
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/3 cup vegetable oil
• 1 cup mashed banana (2-3 large, very ripe bananas)
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp nutmeg
• 2 and 2/3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
• 1 cup yogurt, buttermilk, or sour cream
• 1 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

1. Preheat the oven to 350.
2. In a medium-sized bowl, mix eggs, sugar and oil. 
3. Blend in the mashed bananas and vanilla.
4. Whisk together dry ingredients, then sift them so they are very, very well-mixed.
5. Add dry ingredients all at once to banana mixture and stir just until combined. You don't want to overdo this part.
6. Pour batter into a greased and floured 9x5 bread pan (we used two slightly smaller ones, actually, because this is a large recipe)
7. Bake for about one hour, or until a tester comes out clean.