A Potato Garden

"Honey, your potatoes are sprouting," Avo said last night after peeking in the shopping bag I had perched on the window sill beside the air conditioner. "They look like little alien creatures!"

Oops. Guess I waited too long to decide what to do with the leftover potatoes from Passover (thanks for the shepard's pie idea, mom).

"So what do I do with them now?" I asked.

"Well, you've got two options: throw them out or grow potatoes in the back garden," Avo answered.

Dear reader, I chose the first option.

The good news is that now I don't have to figure out how to use this sack of potatoes. The bad news is that now I feel guilty for wasting so many good (organic!) potatoes.

My cooking juju is clearly off these days. I just can't seem to get it together to prepare a decent meal. Even Avo's birthday dinner on Monday night was underwhelming ("I'm just not that hungry," he said, perhaps to spare my feelings).

I blame the balmy weather we've been enjoying -- It's hard to contemplate cooking hearty foods like potatoes and meat when it's scorching out.

But now that it's cool and misty today, I've got no excuse. You'll be relieved to know that as I type, I'm prepping banana muffins -- I can't bear to throw out these fast ripening bananas without putting them to good use.

Banana Muffins to the Rescue

As I've mentioned before, Avo has one major pet peeve: He can't stand to see bananas go uneaten. It pains him to watch them get so dark and ripe that he knows they are destined for the trash. Before they reach that dire point, he is generally driven to make a banana smoothie or banana bread (in fact, he baked some just last week).

To save him the angst and the effort of baking again, I beat him to it.

Since I knew he'd be seriously bummed out if he came home from last night to find the darn bananas still hanging around, I baked banana muffins (for the first time ever).

Lucky I found this easy, kid-friendly recipe online.


Ingredients

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 large bananas, mashed
3/4 cup white sugar
1 egg
1/3 cup butter, melted

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Coat muffin pans with non-stick spray, or use paper liners (I like the liners). Sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt; set aside.

2. Combine bananas, sugar, egg, and melted butter in a large bowl. Fold in flour mixture, and mix until smooth. Scoop into muffin pans.

3. Bake in preheated oven. Bake mini muffins for 10 to 15 minutes, and large muffins for 25 to 30 minutes. You know they're done when the muffins spring back when lightly tapped.

The most fun part of the process was mashing the bananas. I used a potato masher and really enjoyed pounding the bananas to a pulp.

The least fun part was melting a frozen stick of butter in the microwave. Apparently, I left it in for too long because when I opened the door to the microwave, it smelled like popcorn and there was very little butter left in the glass measuring cup. Where had it disappeared to? Was this some sort of strange magic trick? Unfortunately, not.

Rather, the entire microwave was coated in a thin layer of butter. In case you're wondering, cleaning butter off the inside of a microwave is a real pain.

The muffins, however, turned out perfectly (once I melted more butter, of course). I gave a couple of muffins to Ruby's teachers and in return, they gave me the ultimate compliment.

"Can you bake these for the entire class?" they asked.

"Um, sure. Why not?"

So it looks as if I've got more banana mushing in my future.