Cooking Confidential

Periodically, I’ve played variations on a peanut butter and banana theme inspired by the peanut butter bread idea in my ancient (mid-seventies, the dawn of the age of the serious home bread baker) Bernard Clayton’s Complete Book of Breads. l have always felt that my efforts had a homey sort of appeal, but needed to have the notation refined a bit– at least in my opinion, although certainly they have always disappeared from the kitchen counter very quickly. Indeed, my Asian homestay students are decided fans of this particular combination.

Still, there’s always room for improvement. I am here recording my latest composition before I forget exactly what it is I did: In the form of muffins, they are now in the oven, bursting forth magnificently above the muffin cups. I was encouraged even before they went into the oven; licking a sticky finger, the batter tasted great…..

Set oven to 375 degrees

Mash enough over-ripe bananas to give you about 2 1/3 generous cups (I used 4 large bananas and cheated with about 1/3 cup worth of a very tiny moist sweet potato left over from a previous dinner)

In a large mixing bowl blend
1 cup Jiffy or Jiffy-type peanut butter (mine’s from Aldi, the German discount grocery)
1 cup brown sugar
Add 3 eggs, one at a time
Now blend in the bananas
and then 2 cups all purpose flour and 1 cup white whole wheat (ie, 3 cups of flour), 1 teaspoon baking soda, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1 1/2 salt.

Now mix in about 1 2/3 cups dry roasted peanuts (I used Unsalted Aldi brand)
Bake in heaped non-stick FOIL muffin cup liners ONLY!

This made 15 perfectly proportioned large muffins.
Now I’m going to make a nice cup of coffee and sample one. David has just devoured one and says they’re great….

Well, I hadn’t had lunch, it was already after 2, so I made a large cafe au lait and had…two. Lovely. If you wanted to gild the lily: chopped chocolate (I use Aldi dark milk for this type of thing, a nice, smooth easily chopped bar more semi-sweet that milk in flavor) or chocolate chips, or golden raisins would be just what you have in mind. But I do like them as is… homely simplicity is the way to go here.

P.S. Sorry about the odd (and large) number of muffins. I not only feed, on the average, at least 3-5 hungry males, but am the fortunate owner of a half size muffin pan (ie, six cups only). However, divides easily by thirds, which would bring you down to one regular muffin pan. By the way, if you wanted to make only 1/2 the recipe, the only extra step would be to divide one egg in half: I do this by whipping a whole egg in a small bowl with a wisk, and measure out 2 tablespoons’ worth (1 “large” egg is 1/4 cup, a convenient fact to remember). Otherwise, procede as usual.