I noticed a few days ago that the bananas we bought last week were looking worse for the wear, so I told Pete that we should make some banana bread with them. Here’s something charming and also sometimes inconvenient about my children: They never forget anything. And so first thing this morning, Pete asked when we would be making the banana bread.
So I pulled out my Southern Living cookbook and went about gathering the ingredients. And then I found that I’d somehow run out of all-purpose flour, but I did have a ridiculous amount of whole-wheat flour. I don’t do very many on-the-fly ingredient swaps, so I had to ask the internet whether or not I could use one flour in exchange for another. The internet said that cookbook author Rose Levy Beranbaum says that’s OK, so long as you add some extra water. And so I ventured forth.
I guess that wheat swapperoo made me feel a little footloose and fancy-free, because I also decided we’d make muffins instead of a load and I starting monkeying around with the recipe. It started with a little cinnamon. And then I remembered that Alex’s grandmother had given us a bag of blueberries from her front yard, and that they were in the freezer! So I tossed in a cup of those, too!
I know! The wild night is calling!
Anyway, Pete mashed the bananas while admiring his strong muscles. Then he mixed the wet ingredients together while Poppy stirred the dry stuff, and then we put twelve large dollops of batter into my muffin pan. The rest of it went into some free-standing silicone muffin cups
Now I’ll spend the rest of the day trying not to polish off what remains of the dozen we already baked, because they are crazy delicious.
Whole-Wheat Banana-Blueberry Muffins
based on Southern Living’s Banana-Nut Bread
2 cups whole-wheat flour
1 cup sugar*
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 cup frozen blueberries
1/2 cup butter, melted
3 tablespoons + 1 teaspoon water
3 very ripe bananas, mashed
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla extractPrepare muffin pan; set aside. Heat oven to 350 degrees.
Combine the first 4 ingredients in a large bowl. Stir in frozen blueberries. Make a well in the center of the center of the mixture.
Stir together mashed bananas, eggs, water and vanilla; add to dry ingredients, and stir until just moistened. Spoon into muffin cups, filling 3/4 full.
Bake at 350 degrees to 20 to 30 minutes. Remove from pans immediately and let cool on wire racks.
*This seems like an excessive amount of sugar. I’d like to try to cut it or use something else, but I’m not sure what. Any ideas?
— which is, it should be noted, so horrific and awful and 
heartbreaking and true (or not) and also sometimes even funny — and he was doing a reading in a city about 6 hours away. So we decided we’d borrow a school van and trek down there, and it was a wacky and lovely time.
is the first book about the war in Iraq that I’ve read. Although it might be about Afghanistan; I don’t think the location is every specifically mentioned. Wherever the war is, “The Things a Brother Knows” is the story of a boy whose 18-year-old brother joins the Marines right out of high school, goes to said war and then comes home. He’s wounded, but not physically, and the whole family is struggling to deal with that. It isn’t a terribly long book, but it’s effective. I read it in its entirety last night, and it made me cry a few times. It also made me go to bed far too late and thus be overly sleepy today. (OK, fine. Books don’t make people stay up too late. People make people stay up too late.)
Most of the schoolchildren in our neck of the woods have been out of school all week. We did go out and sled and build some snowmen, but the snow didn’t mean any days off for my poor homeschooled kids. Here’s what we did this week: