Adventures in Peggy's kitchen: banana bread

Not long ago, a friend told me she googled my blog. I wonder if a virtual cloud of dust rose up as I have not been very attentive to this site lately. Mostly because I can't decide what to do with it. So while I noodle the future of pp.com, here's a little foodie story:

My mom taught me to toss too-ripe bananas into the freezer when they languish and multiply until I guilt myself into baking banana bread. Saturday, I found seven brown frozen bananas and instructions that sounded delicious on FoodNetwork.com. 

I doubled this Paula Deen recipe so we would have two loaves when I finished...one for the freezer!

I pride myself on getting all my ingredients together before I start a cooking or baking project, prepping little dishes of wet and dry so I can whiz through the steps. The clean-up drives my husband crazy because he can't figure out why I need to measure.

And I always enjoy tweaking the instructions just a little...so I replaced one cup of sugar with stevia (the baking kind) and I used 2 1/2 cups of wheat flour and 1 1/2 cups of unbleached white flour. There was only a little blood from my knuckle suffered while zesting the orange so I left that in. My seven bananas were just a little shy of three cups so I chopped the orange pulp into little bits and added that to the mashed, thawing banana glop.

I even lined the bottom of my loaf pans with parchment paper! I was pleased when I put them in the oven and stayed so until I was cleaning up and noticed the carefully measured Greek yogurt still sitting on the counter. That was my replacement for the sour cream.

Argh! In a panic, I pulled the warm-but-not-set batter from the oven, dumped it from the carefully prepared pans, scraped the excess from the parchment paper and added the Greek yogurt. 

And then I poured myself a healthy glass of water since it was not yet noon, dammit.

The two loaves baked for a little more than an hour and did the condo ever smell good!

The next time, I'll be braver about the bits of orange and add more of that. And less blood!

Home, Sweet Homes

Road trip!  We've got the house on the market and we're heading south to Miami.

I haven't blogged in weeks.  On purpose.  I felt like I needed to stay low during the most intense time of my job search.  I took some trips, spent endless hours on the telephone and watched hours of newscasts from markets far and wide.

But it was a Facebook message from my former co-worker that put me on the right path.

"Know any morning Executive Producers?"
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Some things that I've wanted to blog about but didn't:

• The News Director in Wisconsin who allowed his anchor to use four precious minutes of air time to recriminate a viewer who wrote a critical message about her appearance.  Jennifer Livingston called the viewer a bully.  What?!  Seriously bad.
• Cable TV is ridiculously expensive.  I have had too much time on my hands but I haven't necessarily watched more television.  I have written the checks to Time Warner, though.  Bring on 4G wireless!
• Never watch the show "Doomsday Preppers" right before going to bed unless you want to dream of the zombie apocalypse all darn night.
• The Kansas City Chiefs are the Worst. Team. Ever.  I attended my final home game as a season ticket holder last week.  I wore black.  I foolishly hoped that they would win, up until midway through the third quarter.  Fire them all.  And some twice.  
• The television station in Denver that accidentally used a spoof shot of the Petraeus bio grabbed from the internet...SMH.  Credibility is precious.  Somebody should get suspended. 
• I cooked and baked quite a bit during my extended vacation from work.  And I wondered about things.  Like...who first decided to separate eggs and beat the hell out of the whites to form stiff peaks?  Can you imagine how long that would take if done by hand?

There's more but this is a start.  Right now I'm working on my "100 Things I'll Miss About Kansas City" list. I'll post that within the next ten days.