-by Alan Vetter
The Banana Wall
After noticing an aging banana slowly fusing itself onto my
kitchen counter, a friend of mine once said, “You know you can freeze those
things and use them for banana bread right?” That was six years ago. You know
what I’ve done ever since? Saved every banana that has begun to show the
slightest sign of decay. You know what I haven’t
done since? Shown any inclination towards making banana bread.For some reason I have guilt issues with splitting up the banana bunches, so I feel obliged to buy no less than eight bananas at a time. I justify my purchase by reassuring myself that my potassium level is probably too low. Single digit low. But honestly, who can eat eight bananas a week? Bananas are the lasagna of the fruit world. Have a banana laden bowl of cereal- unbutton your pants and go take a nap.
The other problem is that I don’t bake. The whole affair
is way too messy for me. I have better things to do than spend an afternoon wiping
up fallout from rogue clouds of flour and rounding up runaway sugar granules
with a sponge. Cleaning should never take longer than cooking, and cooking
should never take an entire day. If I want my kitchen looking like a construction
zone, I’ll cook in the dark thank you.
Then there’s the measuring. Main courses are no problem. Add
some of this, toss in some of that, chop, sprinkle, rub, cook. But baking
requires precision with cups, spoons, lines and fractions. Add to this the fact
that I live in a high altitude recipe zone, and I’m looking at an afternoon
involving some form of trigonometry.
Have you ever looked inside a friend's medicine cabinet?
Not to take anything but just to see what they’re
taking? I do the same with my friend's freezers. I just want to see if I'm
stocked appropriately. Apparently I'm not. Their freezers are usually harboring
a tub of ice cream, a few mysterious ethnic entrees, several pizzas, and the
occasional contorted gallon bag of translucent liquid. If they were to inspect my freezer, they would see nothing more
than a wall of brown, rotten fruit.
Right now I’m looking at a freezer filled with no less then
twenty pounds of those things.
This banana backlog was not a problem until a hunter friend
of mine offered to give me half a carcass of elk meat one fall. Unfortunately my
modestly sized freezer limits any type of Armageddon day hoarding, so naturally
a sacrifice was in order. The bananas had to go.
Elk trumps fruit.
My girlfriend to the rescue
Luckily for me, every three years or so, when I spin the
“Get A Girlfriend" wheel, it lands on “Baker!”. It’s a risk you take
whenever you spin that thing, as you never know what you’re going to get. It
once landed midway between “Massage Therapist” and “Stone Carver”. She had
hands like cheese graters and left my back looking like I slid down a mountain
of razor blades.
After explaining the freezer real estate dilemma to Baker
Girl, I let her know that I had to clear out the accumulated fodder in order to
make room for something that had a soul. The bananas were being relegated
to the compost pile and would have to find themselves a final resting place
amongst the eggshells and coffee grounds.
Unfortunately baker folk cannot bring themselves to throw
out anything that has even the slightest chance of being put into an oven at
400 degrees for 35 minutes. She let me know that this act was unacceptable since people
were starving in Kentucky, and that wasting food was not an option. She calmly stated,
"We're going to make banana bread".
I would finally learn the fine art
of making a mess.
I would also come to learn that a spatula is actually two
very different utensils with the same name. How can anyone be expected to
follow a discipline that has discrepancies like that? But I accommodated for
love, and six hours later we were staring at no less than a dozen loaves of
sweet smelling, golden brown goodness. We
stacked them all into a neat little pyramid, and I gloated like a father whose
oven just gave birth to a
litter of rectangular puppies.
But
we all know that looks aren't everything.
After the flour settled, we were ready to sample the
rotten fruits of our labor. The color was perfect, and the smell sublime, but
after the first bite, I realized that something was definitely askew. Somewhere
along the line we improvised and added an additional step to the recipe that apparently
said- “Remove all moisture”.
Now I'll admit that I don’t have the most widely exposed
palette, but I've got a pair of hiking boots that were probably more succulent.
I found myself pining for a gallon of milk and a shoelace to floss the taste
out of my mouth.
Although the banana bread episode was a complete failure,
there was an unforeseen upside. The great thing about baking a dozen of anything
is that they become great gifts for your friends. “Hey Steve- I thought I’d
give you something that I'm not going to touch.” Since my friends are fully
aware of the fact that I don’t bake, the blame for the freshly forged future little doorstops
thankfully fell on the girl, and she went down in history as “That cute, hot little
number who should never be allowed back in a kitchen.”
Needless to say my banana saving days are over. If I ever
find myself in another relationship in which my partner enjoys squandering a
perfectly good afternoon, she will no doubt be disappointed at my lack of
on-hand baking components. I have freed myself from the chains of obligatory
fruit hoarding and my freezer is a much more masculine appliance now. But as I
gaze upon neatly stacked towers of foil encased elk meat, I am saddened by the
fact that not even the mighty elk can endure an indefinite, cryogenic
lifestyle. It's coming up on two years since I've swapped out all those
bananas, and freezer burn is a horrible end for any food source. So as summer
approaches, I've got to fill the propane tank, choose a spatula, and start
grilling as soon as possible. That animal needs to be eaten soon. I wouldn’t
even know where to begin to look for a recipe for elk bread.
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