Spotty Bananas Need Love Too [Fierce Foodie]

When I was seven years old, I ate nine extra-large, perfectly unspotted, starchy sweet bananas in the space of ten minutes.  I’m not sure why I kept methodically eating banana after banana after banana as if I was in some kind of food challenge for kindergarteners, or why my mother made no move to stop me going down what was surely the path to utter self-destruction, but I soon learned a very important and painful lesson, a lesson that has not lost its turgid, sweaty immediacy twenty five years later:  Too many bananas will block you up big time. They will seriously mess you up. At seven I was doubled over in pain, bargaining with god, that’s how bad it was.

Maybe it was my abhorrence of any spots on my bananas that made me feel as if I had to eat every one of those beautiful golden bananas in the bunch as soon as they lost the greenish tint and before anything marred their perfect yellow peels. I was, like many children, suspicious of adults who claimed that brown, mottled bananas were “just as good,” even sweeter than the unblemished and firm bananas that I preferred. Spots of gushy rot greeted me when I peeled back the flecked outer covering of a forlorn banana, and my seven year old self found this abhorrent. 

Years later, I still find blemished bananas less than appealing. (Ha! Ha! And Ha!) But grown-up Roya has accepted the fact that brown spots happen, that life is too hectic to simply sit and wait for that perfect banana moment, and that sometimes you have to eat the bananas you’ve been dealt and simply scoop out the rotten bits with a spoon. 

Banana Bread (Courtesy of Food network)

Ingredients

1 cup granulated sugar

8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature

2 large eggs

3 ripe bananas

1 tablespoon milk

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

Directions

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Butter a 9 x 5 x 3 inch loaf pan.

Cream the sugar and butter in a large mixing bowl until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.

In a small bowl, mash the bananas with a fork. Mix in the milk and cinnamon. In another bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.

Add the banana mixture to the creamed mixture and stir until combined. Add dry ingredients, mixing just until flour disappears.

Pour batter into prepared pan and bake 1 hour to 1 hour 10 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Set aside to cool on a rack for 15 minutes. Remove bread from pan, invert onto rack and cool completely before slicing.

Spread slices with honey or Nutella, or serve with ice cream.

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featured image credit: Mike Dresser