Banana Bread

Last week, I made banana bread. Call it a cookie hangover (so many cookies, yet none for me to eat!). Call it jealousy, since Mrs. Cunningham made about 400 types of cookies (though not so many as her mother) and I got zero. Call it an ecologically-sound desire to avoid wasting those 2 overripe bananas on the counter. Whatever.

I made banana bread. And since I couldn't be bothered to walk all the way upstairs (!!) to get a recipe from Teh Interwebs, I cracked my Mark Bittman for the first time in a long time.

Bittman and I have a love-hate relationship. People love him, but mostly I hate him. I've made a number of recipes from How To Cook Everything that just plain did not work. Did. Not. Work. So I tend to use the book to answer questions rather than to cook.

Don't get me wrong: I know that this is some kind of curse. I know an accomplished cook in Cambridge (MA) who makes the most amazing things from Bittman's books. But when I make the same recipe, it's yucky. So clearly it is I who am the problemo.

Still, it was there, so I used it. Here's the recipe, because it was pretty good. Even though I mixed the coconut and nuts into the flour (after standing there for 2 or 3 minutes saying, "Mix dry ingredients. Well, pecans and coconut are dry...but surely not...but they're dry..."), and even though I totally forgot the vanilla (I wrote in the margin of the book, "Where's the vanilla, @#@##??" and then saw it in the instructions and had to cross it out. Oops.). So given that I screwed up the recipe and it was still good, I'll call it a winner.

Fill your butter bell now. You'll want it for slathering on the hot bread later.

Banana Bread from How To Cook Everything, by Mark Bittman (slightly altered)

Ingredients:

8 tablespoons butter (I used salted. Don’t have a cow, man.)

[plus extra butter for greasing the pan]

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

3/4 cup sugar

2 eggs

3 very ripe bananas, mashed with a fork until smooth

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/2 cup chopped pecans

1/2 cup grated dried unsweetened coconut

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a 9×5 inch loaf pan. I used a glass pan because I like to see how the outside is baking. Also, butter sticks to glass really well, so greasing the pan is easy.

Mix together the dry ingredients, not counting the nuts and coconut. Cream the butter and sugar, then mix in the eggs and bananas. Stir this mixture into the dry ingredients; do not mix more than necessary. Gently stir in the vanilla, nuts, and coconut.

Slop the batter into the loaf pan and bake for 45 to 60 minutes, until nicely browned. Mine looked great at 45 minutes, but was not at all done. I’d say 55 minutes is probably a happy medium. Don’t be a freak about the knife or skewer coming out clean; banana bread is excessively moist compared to other breads. Do not overcook. Cool on a rack for 15 minutes before removing from the pan. Or, let it cool 10 minutes, then cut a slice out, slather it with soft butter from your butter bell, and serve it ooey, gooey, buttery and delicious to your son, who will say: “Cake!”