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.

Cream Puffs are Not for Every Day (maybe $3, about 45 minutes)

The danger here is that you will eat them all.

I know, having womanfully tried to resist. Then halved the recipe, having failed. Then quartered it, having failed again.

Now I just make these for VERY special occasions, and say: oh, what the hell. Better to die relatively quickly of a heart attack with the taste of cream puffs on my tongue than cream-puff-less, shriveled, incontinent, and telling lewd stories from what I can remember of my past to no one, lying in some vomit-colored vinyl recliner in a nursing home where no one really cares about me because I've outlived all my lovers who died, sated on my cream puffs, of heart attacks. Like we all should.

The recipe, like all good recipes, calls for real butter and actual eggs. Don't substitute. Live instead.

I tend to fill these with flavored custard, but traditionally they're filled with whipped cream. Great gobs of REAL whipped cream. Not Cool-Whip, not that shit that comes in a can and if you suck it right, can make you high. What is that? Jet-whip? [No, it's Reddi-wip. GAH. Their website burned my retina! And what is that SOUND??] I think it's made of recycled plastic. Anyway, buy heavy cream, add a little sugar, whip it with an electric mixer until it's stiff. When you bite these, you should have whipped cream all over your face.

Which is, incidentally, why Chuck eats his with a fork.

Another note: fill these only minutes before serving. Don't fill beforehand. They get soggy fast.

What you need:

1 c water

1 stick of UNSALTED butter

1/2 tsp salt

1 c white flour

4 eggs

In a saucepan, melt butter with water, and bring to a boil.

Remove from heat and add salt and flour, stirring quickly. This will thicken immediately into a weird, doughy paste.

That's exactly right. Return to heat and, stirring constantly, cook for one minute. If you don't, your CPs won't taste right.

Cool completely to room temperature (so you don't cook the eggs when you add them).

Using an electric mixer, or upper arm strength equivalent to four hefty dudes who work construction (trust me on this one), beat each of the eggs into the dough, one at a time. They should be completely incorporated, and the dough should be consistently shiny.

Spoon into about a dozen mounds onto a greased cookie sheet. [Note: these EXPAND, so use two sheets if you have to.] I use two spoons to drop these, like doing cookie dough, then slop them into piles. The dough should be sort of worrisomely slick and loose. It's okay. Keep going.

Bake at 450 degrees for 15 minutes. Turn heat down to 350 degrees and prop the oven slightly open for a few seconds to help it cool. Close the oven and bake at 350 for another 20-25 minutes, until the puffs are golden all over.

Cool completely and halve, giving yourself a top and bottom (not a right and left). Remove any soft bits inside. Eat these greedily, since they are extremely tasty; or, be holier than thou and give them to the dog, who will love you forever after, more ardently than before.

Fill with custard, whipped cream, icing, whatever; put the top back on and shake some confectioner's sugar over the top, if you like overkill. Try not to eat all of them. Let me know how that works.

There you go.

Oat MEAL.

Way back in the bad old graduate school days, my neighbor was a psych grad student and I was dirt poor, I mean poorer than I've been since I was babysitting for a living. I'd lost a job, my boyfriend at the time lived a bazillion miles away, my dissertation director was abusive, I was in the midst of both a divorce and a nasty sexual harassment debacle, and maybe not coincidentally, I wasn't writing. Which meant I wasn't finishing my dissertation, and that was bad, bad, bad. I cried. A lot.

I needed work, I thought. If I could do something, I would be okay. My neighbor, probably a do-gooder who pitied me, but at that point I didn't care, told me she needed someone to read her psych texts into a tape recorder so that she could listen to them as she drove, and she would pay me $10 or something a tape. They were the most boring books I ever read. At one point, she told me to stop yawning since it was dangerous: when I yawned, she did, and that made her sleepy, and after all -- she was driving, so could I PLEASE stop yawning. Yeah, I didn't.

[Right now I'm yawning. Typing the word makes me yawn. Saying it makes me yawn. What IS that?] [Holy crap. Watch the chimps yawn. Mirror neurons? Wow.]

But this was several weeks after she found me crying in the back yard of the trashy little house I rented (and loved) [search Woodrow St, Athens, GA at this site]. She told me I was depressed, and asked why I didn't come over and have some oatmeal and we could talk.

Her name was Amy, she was very concerned in a nice maternal way, and I hated oatmeal. I said, yes, (snork, sniffle), expecting at least to find comfort, if not good food.

This is Amy's oatmeal, minus the mashed banana, only because my bananas weren't ripe. And I ate probably three bowls of it that morning. Afterwards, I went home and threw away my instant oatmeal packets -- never even thought twice again about buying those shitty little envelopes of pre-made oat-refuse my mother'd pawned off as oatmeal. What Amy made, and that crap, are not even kin. I'm telling you what.

What you'll need:

Oatmeal -- I've gotten snobby and buy steel-cut oats (they have their own website!), but plain Quaker regular-cook oats will do

water

dried fruit (here, raisins and dates)

nuts

applesauce or finely diced apples

a little butter and sugar (maple syrup is also good)

Milk or cream if you like to eat your oatmeal that way, though I don't.

Oats cook at a 3:1 ratio: three parts water to one part oats. For three people, if you're having toast, 3 c water, 1 c oats. If you're feeding Chuck (search Bowie on this website), this feeds two people, with toast. One if he's really hungry.

If you're doing just these servings, you'll need about a 1/3 c nuts, 1/2 c dried fruit, 1/4 c applesauce or one small apple, about a TBSP butter and a tsp of sugar.

Boil the water with a little salt, maybe a tsp or so. Add oats (and if you are using diced apple, the apple), stir once, return to boil, turn heat to low, cover, and cook, stirring occasionally, until the water is absorbed.

Meantime, break up the pieces of nut into bite-sized bits with your hands. In a small frying pan, melt a little butter and toast the nuts over medium heat. When they smell like toasted nuts (intensely nut-smelling) and start to turn deeper brown, sprinkle with about a tsp of brown or white sugar and take off the heat.

When the oats have absorbed all the water, add the nuts, dried fruit, and applesauce. If you're using just diced apple, you may want to add about 1/2 tsp cinnamon and a little sugar. Stir. Taste. Adjust salt (for more intense taste); sugar (for more sweetness); or butter (for more richness).

Eat. Think of Amy who was kind to me when I needed it. Thank you, Amy.

There you go.

Biscuits. Just Biscuits.

I grew up on Bisquick biscuits. In hindsight, I think there should be a law against them. I graduated to Grands (canned biscuits by Pillsbury) I think sometime in the 90s. My brother still uses them. Grands leave nasty grease marks on the cookie sheet and dissolve in your mouth. You could eat 63 of them and not feel full, which is probably the point, right? And they're comparatively expensive.

Making your own biscuits isn't hard. Just remember: people who couldn't read or write or add and subtract -- who could hardly talk credibly -- got up and made biscuits without fancy stoves or Danish butter every morning of their lives. Really. And, in parts of the country where it's still 1957, or 1937 even -- like where I live -- they still do.

So here we go.

All you need is:

2 cups flour (I use King Arthur unbleached white bread flour )

1TBSP baking powder

1 tsp salt

6 TBSP softened butter, Crisco, or any solid fat EXCEPT spreadable margarines

1 cup, more or less, buttermilk, spoiled milk, plain milk (milk of any sort)

Utensils: Oven, big bowl, measuring cups and spoons, knife, hands.

Measure out the milk into a measuring cup. Set aside. Pour about 1/4 cup flour on the surface you'll use to knead and cut out the biscuits.

In the big bowl, mix flour, salt, and baking powder. Do yourself a favor and ONLY use Rumford or other non-aluminum-based powders. There may possibly be a link between the ingestion of aluminum and Alzheimer's, and many baking powders are aluminum-based.

With your hands, rub the fat into the dry materials. Don't overdo this. When you look at the flour, you should still be able to see some pieces: not chunks, but pieces. In the picture, here, you can see what that should look like.

Add the milk all at once and mix with your hands until all the flour is incorporated and the dough forms a ball. If the dough sticks to your hands, dust with a little flour until the dough forms up. If the dough is dry and won't pick up all the flour in the bowl, splash in a little extra milk. Just a little at a time.

On the floured surface, knead (only the kneading part of this video) the dough just two or three times. To knead, press the dough with the heels of your hands, rotate 90 degrees, fold top down over, do it again, rotate, fold, etc.

Pat the dough out into an even, flat disk or amoeba shape. Doesn't matter if the edges are regular since you're cutting those off anyway. The thickness of the dough is up to you; the thicker the dough, the fewer -- but the taller -- the biscuits. Biscuits should about double in thickness when they're cooked.

You can wash your hands now.

Lightly grease (spray-grease or pass over it with a little butter or Crisco) a cookie sheet or pizza stone. I use the latter because I have a Neanderthal oven and using the stone means the bottoms of the biscuits don't burn. It also evens out the temp in the oven. But a cookie sheet is just fine.

Square off your dough by removing the edge strips with a knife and cut in even-ish squares. Place the biscuits on the cookie sheet.

Collect the edges into a ball, pat out, square off, cut up, and repeat until you don't have enough of the edges to make a biscuit. Roll this into a ball and place on the cookie sheet.

Now, pre-heat the oven to 425. Don't do it before now, since this allows the biscuits to rest and rise a little before being cooked. Anyway, that's what I imagine is happening in their tender little bodies.

When the oven's heated, bake the biscuits. Set the timer for 11 minutes, and then keep checking. The biscuits are done when the tops are golden brown -- you know the color a biscuit should be: that color.

Sometimes I dust the top of the cooked biscuits with salt. Other people rub the tops with butter. Whatever works. Serve with more butter and jam. This is my own peach jam, which tastes awesome because this year's peaches tasted better than any year I can remember.

There you go.