Banana bread is a current google trend. I heard it has been voted as the top comfort food during this pandemic. Yes, I had some ripe bananas which I didn’t want to throw away, so I peeled, put in my mixer bowl, and kept them in the refrig till I finally had time to bake some banana bread a couple of days ago. Completing my taxes could be moved to a back burner because of the tax deadline extension. Thanks to that extension, not only did I find time to bake some banana bread, I squeezed in time to wash the windows out in our sun room. I had fun looking online for and ordering some replacement gel cling-ons for the sun room picture window. The old cling-ons had gotten dirty. When I tried cleaning them, they started sticking to my fingers, getting distorted enough that I had to peel some of them off the window and throw away. What a sticky mess! Anyway, back to the banana nut bread. I had so many bananas I decided to make a triple recipe, rather than making a double one on one day and having to make more banana bread on yet another day. I had done some quantity cooking before, but it was in kitchens with institutional sized mixers. For this triple batch recipe, I asked my husband to help stir the ingredients in a big cooking pot with a long handled spoon. I had two giant sized aluminum loaf pans, leftover from a window planter craft my Circle of Friends ladies group did many years ago. If I did the math right, each loaf pan held one and a half recipes of batter. I usually used two medium sized pans or so for that amount of batter. Something about living in this stay at home quarantine and the unstable economy made me think it was prudent to make some use out of those giant loaf pans. To make a long story short, I took the bread out of the oven too soon, such that I ended up having to put the loaves back in the oven the next day when my husband and I had discovered the middle of the loaves were still uncooked. It took much longer to finish baking them than I had anticipated. It would have helped if I had some longer than normal toothpicks. The normal sized toothpicks had come out clean when I tested the doneness of the loaves the day before. What is one thing I have I learned during this pandemic? Being frugal may bring new challenges. In the words of my social media consultant, Peter, (way younger than me, who was trying to teach me how to get around in Instagram today, and I accidentally sent someone a picture of a cat), “It’s a learning curve.”
