"Do you have any designs on those bananas?"

-Gretzky

It is really fun to live with someone who also likes to cook, but it is important to ask before using potential ingredients.

Also, it is fun to live with people who share recipes. I don't understand those people who hoard recipes. What's wrong with them? Don't they know good food is meant to be shared?

Dri gave me an awesome recipe for her aunt's banana bread. I added chopped walnuts directly to the batter, and I layered chocolate chips in the middle, because I didn't want them to be throughout the bread, just in one nice chocolate stripe. It is delightful. In this, as in most things, butter is always better.

Dri's Aunt's Banana Bread

3/4 cup butter
cup sugar
2 eggs
1 egg white
3 bananas
3 Tbs lemon juice
3/4 cup oat bran
2 1/4 cups flour
2 tsp salt
2 tsp baking soda

Mix butter and sugar til fluffy. Add eggs/white one at a time, beating well. Mash bananas with lemon juice and stir them gently into butter/sugar/egg mix. Mix dry ingredients together and fold gently into rest of batter.

Pour into greased pan, shake pan on counter to get air bubbles out, and bake at 350 for one hour.

If you like, add some chopped walnuts or a layer of chocolate chips, or both. Oh, and I also added an extra banana, because we had 4 going brown, and I didn't want to leave one lonely banana in the fruit basket.

"Are you growing some rust in that pan?" - Dri

In childhood, I was known for experimenting with food. Not tasting experiments, but scientific ones. What would happen if I combined some milk and peanut butter and green beans and shook it all up and let it sit for two days? (Turns out it smells pretty funny after a while.)

I baked bread the other day and did the trick where you also put a pan full of boiling water in the oven, it helps the loaf stay moist while it bakes. And then I forgot to take the water pan out, so I was growing some lovely rusty bits in the oven for a couple days.

They're all washed away now, but it did make me think of food technology, what a great field it is and how fun it would be to combine milk and peanut butter for a living.