Bread Made with Bananas (maybe $5, about an hour and forty-five minutes including baking)

When your bananas look like this, it's time either for the Banana Angel to descend, wrap your bananas in a cloud of glory, sing hosannas, and lift them miraculously into banana heaven where they hang, forever green, under the dancing, fat green leaves of their mama tree (which is actually apparently a grass, but well, what does it matter in the banana afterlife?), dreaming of uncorrupted sweetness and sucking eternally at the nectar of banana-mama's sap.

Or it's time they were mashed with a fork and scraped into a batter, poured into a loaf pan, baked at hellish temperatures and incorporated into your mortal cell structure with the accompaniment of much butter.

I wonder if the latter bananas are bad bananas. Is banana bread a kind of fruit hell? Or could we think of it as a kind of limited immortality, a sort of banana limbo, given they get to walk around as you for a while?

Maybe eating banana bread is sort of like allowing banana possession?

This, by the way, is why I'm not in seminary.

Well, it's among SEVERAL reasons I'm not in seminary.

Okay, so when your bananas look like this, and you've consigned them to the hell/limbo that is Banana Bread (after having waited, in vain, for the angels), this is how you do that.

I'm pretty sure this recipe is my maternal grandmother's. I'm absolutely sure this is my mother's recipe. I mean I sort of stole it from her, so yeah, I can be absolutely sure. Probably one or the other of them got it from a magazine.

What you need

• 3 VERY ripe bananas, mashed (should yield about 1 c)
• 2/3 cup sugar
• 1/3 c butter, melted and cooled
• 2 eggs
• 3 TBSP sour milk (milk plus a splash of vinegar)
• 2 c white flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 cup chopped nuts

Grease and flour a loaf pan.

In a separate bowl, combine flour, soda, powder and salt.

In a large bowl, mix sugar, butter, eggs by hand until combined. Stir in milk and bananas until combined. Add flour mixture and combine. Add nuts and combine.

See? EASY.

Pour the whole lot quickly into the loaf pan, and let sit for twenty minutes. Preheat the oven to 350 and bake for about 60 minutes. The loaf is done when a knife inserted in the middle comes out clean. Remove from pan when it's cool enough to handle.

You eat this in slices, slathered with butter.

You'll hear angels singing (not like this, or these guys), I promise.

There you go.