Fruits of Procrastination

Sometimes, if you don't act quickly, life makes choices for you.

Sometimes waiting too long (as might happen when local healthcare facilities are overcrowded, when a patient has a case so complicated and delicate and a personality so assertive she looks like a lawsuit waiting to happen; so much so that no one, not one person, thinks her jokes on this subject are funny, and when only a handful of people in the world are qualified to treat her, yet she is also a principled person, above all, who refuses the services of even very brilliant people who are not also nice people, because she doesn't believe cruelty, coldness, and/or overarching vanity should be rewarded in a field devoted to caring for people, and because she also doesn't trust essentially mean people to treat her properly, like something a little more valuable than a lump of meat, like someone whose goals for her own treatment might actually be more important than theirs, and because she has read and studied and had Experiences, all of which have led her to believe that slender will be her chances of meaningful survival and recovery if treated by a mean or even just cold person in a dirty, overcrowded, though world famous urban hospital attached to two Major Medical Schools, with every bench and every elevator named for someone else's beloved, dead rich person, the kind of place where entire hallways connecting rooms where nasty things happen to sick people are also devoted to enshrining portraits of and achievements by the kind of Famous Academic Clinician who not only breaks medical ground for its own sake but also just happens to draw a lot of attention for himself and whatever hospital and Major Medical School to which he has attached himself, all of which translates into money for every institution he touches and a lot of extremely pleasant feelings of self-worth for said Famous Academic Clinician, not to mention a little power over other people, fame after death, and a place for his portrait on the wall of one of the hallways named for a dead rich person connecting rooms where papers are filed, phones are answered sometimes, and really quite terrible things often happen to sick people, and when, of the few specialists brave enough, skilled enough, and compassionate enough to be considered for this patient's case, only one has an appointment open any time in the next two months, an opening which doesn't exist on paper or in any computer, an appointment which really only exists because her oncologist wheedles and begs and gets her squeezed in for five minutes at the end of a four-hour schedule which actually runs into six because nothing is simple enough to be handled in 15 or 30 minutes, no matter what the computer says, or the desktop calendar, because every patient also scheduled to be seen that day is a real person with complexities and sorrows and fears and hideous pain, and because half of the others have also been squeezed in because there are just not enough brave, skilled and compassionate specialists to go around, even with all these world famous hospitals and Major Medical Schools and hallway shrines abounding in this particular urban environment to which people flock from all over the world for learning and medical treatment, and when the follow-up appointment where another specialist will be pulled in to consult over pictures that have yet to be taken cannot be scheduled for another two months after that because tests must be run and specialists must go on one or more vacations), well, sometimes waiting too long can have very bad results indeed.

Sometimes, though, the consequences of waiting can be quite nice.

Sometimes waiting too long means your bananas go black, which looks very bad but isn't.  When your bananas go black, you can either compost them to feed your beautiful, beautiful garden, or you can bake them into quick bread in the form of moist, fragrant loaves, tasty muffins or luscious teacakes.  This is one instance where, to a point -- and it's a very distant point, actually -- the longer you wait, the better will be the consequences.

I am very fond of the following recipe, not only because it was, like so many of my favorite recipes, handed down to me from my mother, who probably clipped it out of some women's magazine sometime during the Cold War, but because the results are always delectable.  I also like this recipe because it is very scalable.  Eggs and bananas are measured in even numbers in the original recipe, which makes proportions surpassingly easy to split.  You can make a few muffins or teacakes from this recipe if you only have one rotten banana and one egg.

I do not know how many times or ways this recipe has changed since my mother clipped it and began tinkering with it.  Though I've visited two Hawaiian islands and found the food largely unmemorable, I have never been to Kauai, let alone anyplace called the Kauai Inn.  I'd love to hear from anyone who has, especially anyone who's eaten banana bread there or, better yet, cooked it there.

Meanwhile, here's the recipe, just the way I got it from my mom, except with more steps actually written down:

Kauai Inn Banana Bread

2 C sugar
1 C shortening
6 mashed ripe* bananas
4 eggs
2½ C flour
2 t baking soda
½ t vanilla**

1.  Preheat oven to 350°F.

2.  Cream shortening and sugar.  Add bananas and eggs, and beat well.  Beat in vanilla.

3.  In a separate bowl, whisk together flour and soda until evenly blended.  Then dump them into the wet mixture, and blend in gently with a spatula.  As with most quick breads, you don't want to spend one moment longer than necessary on this, because you don't want to wear out the soda.  Just be sure you don't have any unmoistened lumps of dry ingredient.

4.  Pour into 2 greased and lined loaf pans and bake 35-40 minutes.

Optional additions:  pecans, walnuts, chocolate chips (the tiny ones are particularly nice)

Optional variations:  for teacakes or muffins, pour into the appropriate greased, but not necessarily lined, cups, pans, molds, etc.

* Of course, "ripe" means rotten.  Sure, you can make banana bread with bananas whose peels are still yellow, and it won't suck, but it will not be very flavorful or moist.  The blacker and gooier your bananas, the nicer will be your banana bread, to a point.  For me, that point is the point where the discernible solids are noticeably out-massed by the discernible liquids in any given banana.  Also, I tend not to use bananas in which I can see fruit fly eggs hatching.  I'm just not that desperate for protein.

** To me, this is a meaningless amount of vanilla.  I love vanilla far too much to so downplay it.  I habitually throw at least one tablespoon of vanilla extract into every recipe that requires any amount of vanilla extract at all, unless I've run out, in which case I might substitute maple syrup*** or a specific liqueur.  I also keep a whole, organic vanilla bean in my sugar jar.  I do not trifle when it comes to vanilla.

You might from time to time read a description of some food or drink whose taste includes "just a hint of vanilla."  When it comes to baked goods, this is something I completely fail to comprehend.  Why hint at vanilla?  Vanilla, as a flavor, is freakin' miraculous!  It enriches everything it touches, adding amazing layers of scent as well as taste -- bitter, sweet, smoky, savory.  I refuse to hint!  I want to scream, loud and clear, "I LOVE VANILLA, AND YOU SHOULD, TOO!"

I have never experienced too much vanilla.  I have never experienced any situation where vanilla overpowered something else I wanted to taste, only very happy marriages between vanilla and other flavors.  I'm not talking about artificial vanilla flavoring, of course.  That crud's so nasty it should only be used when you cook for people you hate.  I mean the real thing.

I use beans sparingly because organically grown ones are something like six bucks each around here, if you can even find them, and one whole bean per bake is just about the proportion I favor.  For extract, I prefer Frontier Coop's glycerin-based, alcohol free version, which is derived from organic vanilla beans.  A 4 oz. bottle is about twelve or fourteen bucks around here, but that's several batches of yumminess from the oven.  It usually takes me a couple of months to use up a bottle that size.  Considering the state of my waistline, or what's left of it, I shouldn't bake more frequently than that.  In this way, using the very best available ingredients not only results in the very best possible product, but it also protects my health and the health of everyone I feed.  (See?  Not profligate after all!  Sensible!  Really!)

***Maple syrup and cooked bananas are, of course, particularly sumptuous together, something I think of as sort of magical when you consider the native environment where each is found.  Another thing you can do with overripe bananas is mash one into your pancake or waffle batter and then cook the pancakes or waffles as you normally would.  When you slice a ripe, but not overripe, banana on top of one or more of the waffles or pancakes you made with that batter, and then pour maple syrup over that, the flavor is something celestial.

Of course, the darker the syrup, the more celestial will be your experience, in my opinion.  Also, again, I am only speaking of genuine maple syrup, not the nasty imitation stuff.  Log Cabin -- snort!  Aunt Jemima?  Ha.  No way.  And Mrs. Butterworth can butter my...never mind. 

True maple syrup that comes from maple trees is not graded for quality but for color and intensity of flavor.  Grade A is lighter and less flavorful than Grade B, not better at all unless that's exactly what you want.  And there are grades within grades, e.g., "Grade A amber," "Grade A light amber," etc. 

As with vanilla, I don't understand why anyone would choose to hint around with this taste, so I never bother with the lighter grades but just go straight for the darkest, most luscious, organically grown Grade B I can find.  Usually it's packaged opaquely, in plastic not glass, and with a label indicating that it's for cooking.  I never really looked, but I think it might be cheaper, too, even though you are getting more mapleness per drop.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this set-up sells more maple syrup.  People see "Grade A" and think it must be higher quality.  Most people do think the lighter colors are more attractive to look at, especially in nice (more expensive) glass bottles.  Meanwhile, when you get more flavor per tablespoon, you aren't driven to drown things like pancakes in syrup (unless you are five years old or have the palate of a five-year-old), and that makes you use up every jug of syrup more slowly.  This, of course, also means you are better able to appreciate the actual pancake, its own texture and flavors.  Also, though maple syrup isn't the worst sugar you can eat, moderating your intake for whatever reason is better for your body.  But none of that moves product off a store shelf.

But then, I don't know how maple syrup is made, except for the part where they stick plugs into trees and hang buckets from them to collect sap.  I think I read in the Little House on the Prairie books 35 years ago that after they collect the sap they boil the heck out of it and strain it, but I am far too lazy to look all that up right now.  For all I know, it takes more work and more raw material to create Grade A light amber pure maple syrup than it does to create deep, dark, rich Grade B pure maple syrup, though I find that hard to believe.  I am willing to be corrected on this point, though, as long as I don't have to do any work to learn the truth on my own.

Yes.  I am greedy for flavor and have a suspicious mind which is also sometimes slothful.  But I can bake.  You've got to give me that.

__________

Reminder:  You only have 2 days, give or take some hours, to enter my midway contest!  If you enter, you might not win.  But if you don't enter, you absolutely cannot win the small and not immediately deliverable but beautiful and unique prize, which will not be muffins and will also not be a crocheted hat with a protuberant pompom.  Though the purpose of this post is to point out that the consequences of waiting are not always dire, if you wait too long to enter this contest, you will experience the very dull consequence of never having been in the running at all.  Your call.

Comments

[huxley]

In case you're interested, it takes 10 gallons of sap to make 1 quart of maple syrup and each tree will produce roughly 10 gallons of sap. A sap producing tree won't be suitable for making maple-syrup grade sap until it is roughly 40 years old.

The grades actually corresponds (roughly) to when in the season the maple sap was harvested. The differences in the taste and consistency between grades is actually caused by changes in the trees as the season passes (very dependent on the metabolism of the tree).

If you are looking for more mapleness per drop in American made syrups, you should look for "made in Vermont". A gallon of Vermont syrup --in the same grade and colour class-- weighs more than a gallon of any other American maple syrup because of the rigourous standards in Vermont (elsewhere in the US the gradings are voluntary standards, not so in Vermont).

Up here in Canada there is a different grading system, Canada #1 maple syrup (which comes in Extra light, Light, and Medium colour classes), Canada #2 (which is Amber) and Canada #3 (Dark). The majority of maple syrup sold worldwide for table use is Canada #1 Medium.

[Sara]

Thank you, Huxley!!! That's extremely interesting information, especially about the color changes.

So here's the real question: Is the difference in flavor between Grade A light amber and Grade B strictly in my head? I think my true love and I shall have to take a trip north to Vermont one of these days, strictly in the interests of scientific inquiry, mind you. I'm too lazy to look stuff up on the web when I have a head cold, but I may not be too lazy to go spend some winter weekend in a B&B sampling different grades of maple syrup. I just might be able to find the strength to take on that challenge somehow. ;)

[huxley]

Hi Sara,

Nope, the taste is definitely different and I'd bet you could tell the difference with your eyes closed.

Grade A is tapped (depending on the area's climate) around February while Grade B would be during the transition to Spring. Lots of changes in the trees and in the sap at those points so it is probably not surprising the taste would change.

[Blue]

Yay for black bananas and those yummy looking muffins.

Boo for Experiences.