Brought in all the remaining tomatoes yesterday morning—we had a good hard frost, unusual for us this early in the year in Texas. I used to put green tomatoes on windowsills in the sun to ripen, but I've found it works much better to spread them out on a tray, in a single layer, between sheets of newspaper. How counterintuitive is that? I suppose it's related to the way you ripen fruit from the grocery store in a brown paper bag.
Moist ingredients:
3 large (or 4 small) bananas, very ripe and soft
1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 large egg, lightly beaten
1/2 cup molasses (or honey, or a combination--the molasses makes it darker and more, well, molasses-y, while the honey makes it lighter and sweeter. I sometimes use 1/4 cup of each)
We'd been looking for a sale on a particular type of small drawer unit for odds and ends... I already have a couple in my home office and we wanted a couple more for our master closet. So in the mass of flyers in the Thanksgiving weekend paper, we found an offer of exactly the unit we wanted: buy one, get one free. Perfect! Except it was the wrong store... we usually shop at OfficeMax (closer and more convenient), and the flyer was from Office Depot.
Thank you for your kind welcome, Becky, Lynn, and Jennye.
Yesterday I made banana bread because a cousin and her SO were stopping in for coffee on their way to the airport. It's an all-whole-wheat-flour recipe, but it comes out lovely and light because I use one of my Grandmama's tricks: after I've put the batter in the pan, I let it stand for fifteen minutes or so before I put it in the oven. You can actually see it puff up. If you do this before you bake it, you get a good head start on lightness.
...and I'm a kind of an oddity, in that I grew up in the fifties and was actually taught old-fashioned homemaking by my mother... cooking, baking, cleaning, ironing, sewing, knitting, gardening, keeping a man happy, and definitely making a dollar stretch! I then proceeded to turn my back on the whole thing and become a single career woman for forty years.
