I’m not sure how you feel about bananas. I’ve certainly spent far too much time contemplating their value and dealing with my own indifference towards them.
As I said in an earlier post about roasted chocolate banana, “I’m prone to treating them the way that a cad uses women: I don’t particularly like them (alright, I’ll say it, I’m not that into them), but I’ll eat them anyway because they’re convenient and easy when nothing better is around.”
So like anyone or anything you don’t care that much about, you end up taking bananas for granted and before you know it, they’re too ripe to eat. (This is where the analogy either stops working or eerily continues working perfectly.)
Anyway, so rather than letting them go to waste and throwing the overripe bananas away, I and your grandmother who survived the depression like to make banana bread.
I’ve consulted a lot of banana bread recipes over the years and I think today I finally perfected a recipe that is just right. I also decided to spice things up a bit with… spices. (Pun intended, I guess. Sorry.)
So without further ado, I present…
Chai-Spiced Banana Bread
3 or 4 ripe bananas (mashed)
1/3 cup melted butter
¾ cup organic cane sugar
1 egg (beaten)
1 tsp almond extract (like handbags, real is better than imitation)
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
¾ tsp allspice
¾ tsp cardamom
½ tsp cinnamon
Pinch of salt
1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
Preheat oven to 350º. In a large mixing bowl, mix butter into mashed bananas. Add sugar, egg and almond extract. Sprinkle baking soda, baking powder, spices and salt over entire mixture and mix well. Add flour last and mix well. Pour batter into buttered loaf pan. Bake 1 hour. Cool on a rack before removing from pan.
Joyce Wu
dark locks
