10 points of minutia and a recipe

1. Banana bread with Nutella is delicious.  I make really good banana bread (recipe below).
2. Aldi has a very decent Nutella knock-off. 
3. Schubert has had a yellow bandage on his left leg for a full week now, and he has not chewed it off, even though we have not been making him wear his cone.
4. Hearing the sound of a bathroom fan running makes me feel cold.
5. I have taken to washing my face with raw honey every night before bed.  This has been very good for my skin.  Also, it is fun.
6. My husband and I both need new slippers; perhaps we will buy some today.
7. The weather in New York may have some similarities to the weather in England.  Reading a Flavia de Luce book yesterday, I was struck by Bradley's description of the desaturated colors of winter outside Buckshaw as the snow fell wet and hard, exactly the way it was falling against my vinyl-sided house last night.
8. I wish it were warm enough for widespread, wandering walks.  Cold gray days make my head ache and my muscles cramp. 
9. Once I tried to whiten my teeth with activated charcoal; however, they turned orange.  Well, perhaps it was more of a pearly peach.  It was rather a pretty color if you were talking about flowers or fabric or nail polish, but it was not a nice color for teeth.
10. My husband turned 49 on Monday.  It seems to me that Monday is rather an appropriate day for turning 49.  On Monday we had dinner at Olive Garden (their cappuccino maker was broken) and blueberry-apple pie at home. He received two cards and two neckties, not correlated.  On Tuesday he received two bags of Dunkin Donuts coffee and a DVD, and I prepared him a dinner of roast rib-eye, cheesy mash, nasty salad and asparagus.  Today, perhaps we will buy him slippers and an iPad.  Perhaps.

A character shot of my dearly beloved on the occasion of his 49th.

I think he is pretty fantastic.  I love his eyes in this picture.  

He is putting ice cream on everyone's pieces of birthday pie, 

trying to get just the amount that everyone wants, 

because he is very thoughtful that way.

The promised banana bread recipe:

Banana Bread

1 cup sugar

1/3 cup vegetable oil

2 eggs

3-4 very ripe bananas, peeled and mashed*

1/4 cup water (or less)

1 and 2/3 cup white flour

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp. salt

1/4 tsp baking powder

2 tsp. vanilla

1/2 tsp. nutmeg

Preheat oven to 350.  Grease the bottom of a large loaf pan.  Sift together flour, baking soda, salt and baking powder.  Set aside.  In a large bowl, combine sugar, oil, eggs and banana.  Mix well.  Add vanilla and nutmeg.  Mix some more.  Stir in the sifted flour mixture.  Add up to 1/4 cup water, if needed, to help the batter mix and come to the right consistency.  Pour into loaf pan, and bake for 70 minutes.  Test with a kebob skewer (or a toothpick) for doneness.

*My banana bread is the best I have ever had.  I think it may be because I use very, very old bananas.  I leave them on the counter until they are almost completely black, and then I put them into the refrigerator for a few more days.  As long as there is no mold on them, they are fair game.  When I peel them, the peels are stiff and the insides are very soft, dark and almost translucent.  They sometimes smell a trifle fermented.  Usually I have two bananas like this, from my refrigerator, and two that are spotty and past what people would want to peel and eat, but have not yet left the counter.  That's just the way it tends to work out here.  My boys are actually quite instrumental in helping me cultivate the right bananas for bread... because they look forward to it.