"There are starving kids...somewhere...that would be happy to eat that." My parents never had to convince me to eat the pasta or bread, or anything else that would ever go bad, for that matter. Nope, the real convincing had to be done for produce.
Now there are two reasons for this. 1) eating fresh fruits and vegetables are good for you, but perhaps even more saliently 2) PRODUCE IS EXPENSIVE AND ROTS ... after like, a day
I now understand why our parents were mad when we didn't eat spinach, broccoli, whatever; this stuff is expensive! and you only have a few days before its actually inedible. Now I'm a grad student, so I'm not exactly making millions here. However if I don't partake in a daily dose of these finicky plants I feel awful and my concentration goes to hell (not so great for anyone enrolled in a graduate statistics course). Therefore, in the face of expiring food, I have to get a little crafty in order to get maximum value from my shopping trips.
oh look, bananas...
delicious right? ...not
But thats ok! because while they're totally inedible this way, they have now become the perfect consistency to make banana bread! (note: the picture above has some white-ish sheen on the edges. This is because I had to stick them in the freezer before my roommates threw them out. It's frost, not mold. That would be gross).
So thats what I did.
To turn nasty bananas into something this good, you need a few extra (but highly common and non-expiring) household ingredients.
If you really want to help the banana bread reach its full potential, I recommend adding chocolate and peanut butter chips.
The recipe calls for
- 1 1/3 cups of mashed over-ripe bananas
-2/3 cup of sugar
-1/4 cup of milk
-3 tablespoons of vegetable oil
-3 eggs
-2 2/3 cup of Bisquick
Preheat the oven to 350, and grease a loaf pan. Combine all ingredients except Bisquick in a random tupperware container borrowed from a friend (if you have a life and a real job and stuff figured out you might even have a mixing bowl, my instructions are more for the spontaneous unplanned poor person's baking session). Now stir the Bisquick into the mix until as many lumps as possible are gone. Add chocolate chips :) and pour into the loaf pan. Close the oven door. Set timer for 60 minutes to bake, while simultaneously realizing you didn't know it would take this long and now you're committed to a project that needs to be over in more like 20 minutes...not an entire hour.
text your friends to tell them you'll be late for the study group
text your friends to tell them you'll bring them fresh banana bread if they wait for you to do their data analysis
check on it ever 5 minutes muttering "c'mon c'mon c'mon, this is taking forever" (that helps it bake faster)
take it out and test it with a fork or a toothpick to make sure it baked all the way through
and enjoy!
Friends quickly forgive you for being late as long as your bring a peace offering. And that's a good thing, because while I'm pretty great at making banana bread, I am not so great at stats. It's a fair trade-off.
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