It is Banana Bread, but Does It Count As a Recipe?

If it's smack in the middle of the only two hours you have to yourself all day, the time in which you need to set up lesson plans and grade papers and answer emails and update your pumpkinbear etsy shop and work on your book proposal and maybe, I don't know...MAKE something, but the baby won't nap and hasn't napped all week and it's making you suspect that she's starting to give up her nap (oh, no, please no), what do you do?

You and the baby make banana bread.

Of course, you don't want to use refined sugar because you're so over refined sugar (why will the baby weight not come OFF?), so instead of refined sugar you use up the rest of the agave nectar and the brown rice syrup (which was a mistake, because now you have to find time on a Tuesday to go to Sahara Mart for more brown rice syrup so that you can make more baked nori). Oh, and you don't have cinnamon or nutmeg because you used them up making cinnamon cut-outs so instead you dump in some ginger and cut up some candied ginger, too. And if you're going to do that, you might as well throw in some dried blueberries and the rest of the bag of walnut pieces, right?

Anyway, if you make banana bread with the baby, you should absolutely turn your back so the baby can't see, and then pour some of the banana bread batter into a little heart-shaped tin. If you do that, and bake it, and then frost it with peanut butter, your babies----will be delighted. And when they see that you have cut the heart in two for them----so that they can break it apart like a puzzle--

Well, you know what little girls are like when they're happy and excited, right? They'll do that.

This banana bread that I made is nice and dense and moist and yummy. Again, I'm not really sure if what follows will count as a recipe--it's originally from the Bountiful Blessings Cookbook, in celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Indiana Midwives Association (I am also a sucker for cookbooks put out by churches and elementary schools and ladies' clubs and such--more on that later), and since out of the entire recipe I only accurately followed the cooking time and temperature and the number of eggs, AND since the recipe is technically for pumpkin bread, not banana bread...well, here it is, anyway. Do with it what you will.

Banana Bread

1. Preheat the oven to 350.
2. Mash up three bananas in a bowl.
3. Mix with four eggs and two-ish cups of agave nectar, brown rice syrup, maple syrup, or honey.
4. Add in nearly a cup of olive oil or cocunut oil or butter or whatever fat you happen to have handy.
5. Dump in 3 and 1/3 cups white whole wheat flour and a little salt and soda and mix.
6. You forgot the milk--pour in 2/3 cup.
7. Add in a random assortment of spices--ginger, clove, etc.--and a random assortment of mix-ins--dried cocunut, nuts, seeds, etc.--and mix it all together.
8. Pour it into greased little loaf pans.
9. Bake it for about an hour. Seriously. An HOUR.

See? It's good.