Recently I learned how to make
the “World’s Easiest Banana Bread.” Then I learned how to make it the hard way:
Let your four-year-old help you.
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| (Photo: Steve Hopson, www.stevehopson.com) |
We had three bananas getting
brown on the counter, which is a rarity around here. We are serious about our
bananas, and they never last long. If my husband or I are at a grocery
store—even if the only things on the list are tampons and light bulbs—we will always
buy bananas because, well, we always need them or are about to need them.
So. Somehow, these three bananas
had been allowed to exist long enough to get a little brown. And the only thing
I hate more than mushy bananas is throwing out food, so I decided we would make
banana bread. According to the clock we had just under 2 hours until we had to
leave for Matthew’s T-ball “practice” (have you ever seen 3- and 4-year-olds
play T-ball? If so, you get the need for quotes just there). I figured we had
lots of time. No problem, right?
Right.
I Googled “banana bread recipe”
and got about 1,000 recipes for banana bread that all included goofy
ingredients like buttermilk or rum that would require a trip to the store.
Taking two kids to the grocery store was NOT what I had in mind when I imagined
making banana bread. (Taking two kids to the grocery store is pretty much NEVER
what I have in mind. Ever.) So I refined my search to “EASY banana bread
recipe,” and I hit the jackpot. The very first hit, from simplyrecipes.com, required only ingredients I already had! I hit
“print” and headed for the kitchen.
I gathered my ingredients and my
4-year-old and soon realized how this was going to go. Matthew was interested
ONLY in cracking the eggs. As I squinted at the recipe, he badgered me, “NOW do
I crack the eggs? NOW? When, Mommy? Mommy, when? Mommy, WHEN DO I GET TO CRACK
THE EGGS??”
I thought that smushing up
bananas would be a good distraction, so I pulled a dining room chair up to the
counter for him to stand on and told him to go for it. This was a special
privilege because standing on chairs is usually not allowed. This is a tough
rule for Matthew to follow. Pretty much every time I do something like, I don’t
know, clean the cat box or go to the bathroom alone, I emerge to find him standing
on a dining room chair. Not doing anything, usually, except gleefully breaking
the we-do-not-stand-on-chairs rule. But today? Today he was being a stickler
for the rules. And he refused to stand on that chair.
So, as Matthew attempted to mush
bananas that he could not see because he was kneeling instead of standing on
the chair, I got out some yogurt to substitute for the butter in the recipe.
Why? I don’t know exactly. Yogurt is not in the original recipe, but someone in
the comments had said that if you replace the butter with yogurt, the bread
would be “healthier.” And since I had a feeling that I was going to be eating a
LOT of this banana bread, I decided to blindly follow that advice. Now, measuring
yogurt shouldn’t be hard. But measuring yogurt with a 4-year-old’s help is very
hard. First the yogurt has to be spooned from its container into a measuring
cup, then dumped from the measuring cup into a bowl. The result? Some yogurt in
the bowl and lots of yogurt everywhere else.
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| http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/banana_bread/ |
A quick check of the clock told
me this was taking a bit longer than planned, what with pleading with my kid to
break rules and cleaning yogurt off of my shoes, but we should still have
plenty of time to finish up and get it baked before T-ball. I mean, how long
could making banana bread take?
Next was sugar. Once again, I deviated from the
original recipe, cutting the sugar down to ¾ cup and using brown sugar instead
of white sugar. I couldn’t begin to tell you the difference between brown and
white sugar (other than the obvious), but, again, someone in the recipe’s comments
said it was a good idea, and who am I to argue with the internet? Though we
still hadn’t cracked any eggs, the sight of sugar caught Matthew’s attention.
He finally stood up on the chair and offered to help measure and pour, which
went about as well as the yogurt. I turned away to grab a sponge to wipe up,
and when I turned back I found Matthew, literally up to his elbows in brown
sugar, licking his arm, hand, and fingers like a starving wild animal.
I put a stop to the sugar feast,
handed him a wooden spoon, and told him to stir. Matthew went for it with
gusto, though his speed at mixing far exceeded his effectiveness. “Look at me!
I’m an agitator in a washing machine!” he yelled. Before I could ask him where
exactly he learned that, he went on,
“I’m a tornado! A mixing tornado!” He paused long enough to grab the second
spoon that I was holding, stuck it in the sugary, yogurt-y banana goo and
yelled, “DOUBLE AGITATOR!”
Apparently, all that sugar was
kicking in.
Finally, FINALLY, it was time to
crack the egg. Just one, it turns out, which was lucky because that’s all we
had. I gave it to Matthew and stood back. Matthew has a strange method of
cracking eggs that absolutely demolishes the egg, but somehow lands very
little shell in the bowl. There’s also a whole stab-the-yolk-until-it-“pops”
thing that can be kind of disturbing if you think about it too much. Once all that
was done, it was back to the agitator-tornado for more stirring, and we moved
on through the recipe.
When it was time for the flour,
I knew I had to proceed with caution. Flour is a pain in the butt to clean up,
and we didn’t have a lot of extra time. But of course it went everywhere, leading
Matthew to tell me triumphantly, “Mommy! I have flour on my nipples!” (Yes, he
was wearing nothing but underpants, his
favorite outfit.) The situation didn’t improve as he began his crazy stirring
again, which somehow didn’t incorporate the flour into the batter at all but
did manage to incorporate it into his hair.
I looked at the clock with
dread. At this point, we would be late to T-ball if the bread took a full hour
to cook, so I did some damage control. I gave Matthew a spoon to lick while I quickly
mixed in the flour, poured the batter into the pan, and put it into the oven. The
kitchen was a mess, and I knew that I should enlist Matthew’s help in cleaning
it up—you know, teach him that cleaning up is part of the process of baking and
all that—but I still had to get us both dressed and sunscreened and get a
snack together. So I did what any parent would do (right? RIGHT?). I turned on
“Yo Gabba Gabba.”
And then, as I tried to clean
brown sugar and flour out of the fruit bowl, the dish drainer, the silverware
drawer (???), I heard a question that I would hear at least 40 more times in
the next 50 minutes: “Is the banana bread done yet?”
We were NOT going to make it to
T-ball on time.
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