I baked banana bread tonight; I am eating warm slice of it right now.
Big deal, eh?
A year ago I could not say this. One day I saw again the pile of brown bananas I had let linger on the counter too long. In a surprise move, I googled “banana bread recipe”.
There’s only 3,000,000 results.
My rough rule for trying new recipes is choosing one with the smallest list of ingredients and the fewest steps.
Joy’s Easy Banana Bread recipe fit the bill, and it worked.
The question with recipes, and quick solutions in general, to me is, “Is this a bounding box or a starting point?”
As I iterate with recipes, I end up annotating them:
Marked up recipe
First of all, being diabetic, I replace the 1 cup of sugar with Stevia; but the ratio is 3:1, so it’s marked as 1/3 cup Stevia.
Joy put 1 egg on the ingredients, but I like mine moist, so I tried 2, and that’s my regular approach now. Maybe I’ll bump to 3 soon.
Joy called for 1 teaspoon of baking soda, but the first time I made it the only baking soda was a box of unknown vintage in the fridge. But several reviewers of Joy’s Easy Banana Bread suggest using baking powder over soad, and that I had. Boom, augment that recipe.
Finally, all on my own I started adding crushed walnuts to the mix.
That recipe is pretty marked up.
I prefer to use the same approach in all my work. Don’t take recipes for rigid rules. If you want to discuss this more, come on over. I have a few slices of banana bread left over.
And it’s goooooood.
Featured image: The banana bread I made tonight from my annotated recipe- From Three Mushy Bananas.. flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
