baked goodness and kitchen tips

today there is much sickness in our house. and it all started last night, so needless to say i am very tired tired today. nobody warns you about this part of motherhood that makes you question everything in the wee hours of the night. but that's a post for another time.

instead i'm going to talk about how i decided to do something productive and useful. today i made banana bread.

i always buy bananas, which i think is a requirement to feed the under 3 set. but everybody here loves bananas. so we end up buying lots. sometimes too many. like last week there was one sad little banana left, and nobody wanted it. and then it got to brown for the boys to eat, because they're picky about that kind of thing. and then it got too brown for me to eat, because i'm also picky about that kind of thing. and then it got so brown it kind of started oozing this brown juice all over the counter so i finally threw it away.

anyway, one overly ripe banana is hard to do things with. but a bunch of overly ripe bananas scream to be used in bread or cupcakes or cake or pancakes. or maybe i just look at overly ripe bananas and think cake. it's just how i am.

still, we had five bananas begging to be used, and i didn't think cake when it came time to do something with them. maybe it's because i wanted something different. or maybe it's because there are so many sick people here, and a nice, soft, comforting bread seemed more in order then a towering, sugary mess.

so i made banana bread, utilizing my favorite banana mashing technique: a potato masher. the truth is, unless my hand mixer is out of commission, i never use a potato masher to make mashed potatoes. we like our mash fluffy and smooth around here, and you just can't get that with a hand masher. but it makes perfectly mashed yet chunky bananas for baked goods. a hand potato masher also works really well if you need to cream butter and sugar, and the butter's not quite to room temperature. sure, you could warm the butter in the microwave, but i have yet to get that trick down quite right. i know there's a spot between rock hard butter and a melted golden pool, but i have yet to find it by using the microwave.

so even though i'm surrounded by sickness and suffering from lack of sleep, i can say i accomplished one awesome thing today. which is still better then other days where i don't have any good excuses for my laziness.