It's Bananas

Here's the problem with sharing a kitchen with four other flat-mates, having no minutes on your foreign phone plan, and passing a supermarket on the way home from class every day: Bananas. Last week, my flat-mate and I each independently realized the flat needed more bananas; so we each bought them. The result? One week later, we were staring at 11 over-ripening bananas. What does one do when faced with such fearsome fruit? Rather than go bananas, we came up with a few creative solutions.

That's right: We cooked. Our bananas became one loaf of peanut-butter-chocolate-chip banana bread, one loaf of cranberry banana bread, and one batch of chocolate coated frozen banana slices.

For those cooking at home, the basic banana bread recipe is easy. Start with a preheat to 350 F (175 C):

• Soften 1/2 stick of butter (113 grams)
• Add 2 eggs
• Add 2-3 ripe bananas, mashed
• Stir in 2/3 cup of sugar (134 grams)

If you're cooking in the UK, you'll want to get conversions for grams. Or, if you're cooking with Americans who brought their own measuring cups, you won't bother.

Meanwhile, combine:

• 1 and 1/3 cups all-purpose unbleached flour (160 grams)
• 3/4 teaspoon salt (4 mL)
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda (3 mL "bicarbonate of soda")
• 1/4 teaspoon baking powder (1 mL)

Yep, we're ripping this recipe off TheFreshLoaf.com.

Mix 'em together, add your chocolate, peanut butter, or berries, and pop in the oven for 30 minutes or so.

As for the chocolate bananas, we just melted down some baking chocolate, used some vegetable oil to thin it, coated some bananas, and put 'em in the freezer on wax paper. It ended up kind of gloppy, but it still tasted good.

And, if you still have bananas that you don't know what to do with, throw 'em in a frying pan with some butter and sugar to make these, like I did a few weeks ago.

Learn British: Get on. Nope, this isn't what you say when your lifeboat drifts past a lonely survivor, clinging to a fragment of shattered wood as he freezes in the midnight ocean. To get on is to get along with, as in, "Her parents and me? Oh, we get on just fine," or, "They've just met, but they seem to get on great!" This is not to be confused with the phrase "get it on," which differs in meaning.