Baking Banana Bread: Why Mom knows best

All I wanted to do was make banana bread. That's how it started.

So, I find a recipe and look through what it requires (thank you, Special Foods for teaching me to ALWAYS read through a recipe before actually starting anything).

List of things I do not have: flour, sugar, baking powder, shortening, etc. etc. etc.

More things I don't have: A mixer, and a bread pan.

I don't like grocery shopping, and having been "about to move" for 3 months now, I keep saying "I don't want to buy a bunch of stuff I'm just going to have to move." Well, finally I caved.

So I call my sister. I figure, "she's all domestic, she should have extra supplies floating around."

Success! She has extra bread pans, and she'll bring them to me when we hang out the weekend before my birthday (which would be the Weekend of the Sunburn, for those keeping track). Not only does she bring me a big pan and a little pan, but - ah ha, how did you know??? - a hand mixer. Of my very own.

So, two weeks later, I'm finally back in baking mode. I go grocery shopping. It's the most I've spent grocery shopping in several months (which was still not much).

Get home, start mixing, only to discover that I forgot the baking powder. So I just decide to go put gas in my car and get the baking powder at the same time.

Apparently, 7 p.m. is when EVERYONE decides to put gas in, because there were lines almost back to the pop cooler. Takes 1/2 an hour to get my car's tank filled.

BUT, I figure, not a total loss - they had baking powder. And as I'm looking at the shelf, I see baking soda and shortening right next to it. I say to myself, "Hey, I don't have that stuff, maybe I should get it." Then I think, "Nah, I'm not buying anything I don't need."

Turns out, I needed it. Get back home, have stuff halfway mixed, realize that shortening was in fact part of the recipe. How I missed that the first 3 times, I don't know (proof reading skills had shut down for the day, I guess). Rather than go back to the store, again, I do what any smart girl does to problem solve: call Mom.

After several dropped calls and my phone shutting off in the middle of my sentence (fun feature of the LG), I finally get to the heart of my problem:

"Mom! All I want to do is bake banana bread but I keep not having the right ingredients and I don't want to go back to the store!"

"What don't you have?"

"Shortening."

"Ok, you can use ...."

And she lists of several substitutes. She also critiqued my recipe and gave me hers, which is now written in the margins of my cookbook.

This led to a lengthy discussion on the disproportionate change in the amount of sugar used between her recipe and mine (3/4 c. vs. 1 1/2 c., for anyone interested).

So, Mom and I came up with an experimental combination of the two recipes. We split the difference and used 1 c. of sugar, and kinda played around with some of the other stuff.

I figure now I'm in the clear. Now I can bake in peace.

False.

It took almost 2 hours for the dumb thing to bake. I followed the recipe, so I don't know if it's just my oven or what, but...I made French toast, ate French toast, cleaned up the dishes from French toast, cleaned the kitchen, changed a light bulb (which is an obnoxious process with the light fixtures in my house in and of itself), re-organized my cupboards, and had a good chat with Gramma while waiting for the bread to bake. It was almost 10 p.m. by the time I finally wrapped the bread up (literally).

You might be thinking, "What a ridiculously long blog just about her baking bread. Jeez." Um, yeah. That's how I felt.

Like I said, all I wanted to do was make banana bread. Nothing is ever simple for me.

*Note: Despite the ridiculous process, it ended up quite tasty. My coworker said he now expects zucchini bread on Monday. We'll see.