Here in the great state of Michigan, it’s been rather toasty. I love the warmer weather of the spring time because it still drops to a comfortable sleeping temperature at night. Summer is such a different story. It’s not. Really hot. And even when it rains, we don’t get a reprieve from the heat. And the humidity. Ugh. My super straight hair gets curly and the fly-away’s start flying away crazily. Summer in Michigan is best spent at the beach where the cool water is refreshing and the breeze off the lake cools you down as you bask in the sun. That is pretty much how I spent the 4th of July weekend. We spent two days up north on the water where I worked on my tan and read a book. Lovely days all around. As we were driving home on Monday though, Alex called and began pleading for a window air conditioner. Did either of us have someone we could buy one from? No more dehumidifier for us. It puts off way too much heat he said. I stayed at my parents house that night. Drove back to Ann Arbor in the morning to get ready for work, and Alex was right. The temperature in the apartment wasn’t getting below 79ish. That’s a bit toasty for sleeping I think. So, I kept traveling back and forth between A2 and my parent’s house, thankfully only about 30 minutes travel time each way.
I had bought some bananas to go into my smoothies, but I kept forgetting about them until after my smoothies were made. I put the bananas in the freezer in hopes of keeping them around long enough to make them into something. I figured the A/C of my parents house would be good for baking so Wednesday, I baked. I made homemade macaroni and cheese and a batch of banana bread. There were some problems though.
As I was waiting for the pasta to boil, I figured I’d throw together the banana bread batter. I got a little ahead of myself and put the kinda gross looking bananas into the bowl with the butter. Oops. Forgot to cream the butter and sugar first. Oh well, I told myself. I’ll just cream the butter, sugar, and bananas all together. That was the first problem. Butter doesn’t like to be creamed into anything except for sugar. There were chunks of butter everywhere. I kept mixing and mixing and mixing and mixing until the chunks of butter were mostly gone. By that point, it was over worked. I added everything else in and there didn’t seem to be that much batter. I added the chocolate chips, and still, not that much…and it was super dense. Not light like waffle batter, but thick like I should have kneaded it first.
Then I asked Terry to get the nut grinder down for me. He didn’t realize that it wasn’t put together, and the glass bottom dropped and hit the tile floor, shattering into a gazillion pieces. That was definitely an “oh shit” type of moment. I went in search of the broom since it was in fact my house, and swept up enough glass to get Terry out of the middle of it. I threw dinner in the oven so it wouldn’t be 10:00 by the time we ate and we set to cleaning up. There was glass everywhere. Little bits are still being found I hear. I had a couple of cuts on my legs since I was wearing shorts and the one bled for a good long while.
Once the Mac and Cheese was in the oven, I used the top part of the nut grinder to get some walnuts in the mix. That certainly didn’t help the situation. When it came time to put the batter into the bread pan, it didn’t move. It just stuck in the bowl. I helped it out with a spoon and kinda smoothed it out to make it flat, but that’s just about how it baked. It never rose. It’s like a block of banana bread. There are very few holes in it and I refuse to share such a dense piece of bread. Ick. Another bread failure to add to my ever growing list. I used the banana (who really knows when that needs to end, by the way. Banananananana….) bread recipe from a while ago and the mac and cheese was simplish. It needed more cheddar then what I had because it wasn’t quite salty enough. I’ve been eating it with hotdogs (yeah, yeah, yeah…my healthy food love hasn’t extended enough to get me off of hotdogs with my pastas).
