banana bread cocaine.

my good friend sarah gifted me the seminal cookbook, the Joy of Cooking, as a wedding present in june.  over the summer i cracked open the dense volume (along with another great cookbook given to me by my friend erin) and ran my fingers over the pages, anxious to cook.  i think somehow in my antiquated ways i associated becoming a wife with cooking actual meals that consisted of more than 3 ingredients (which, for me, had been chicken, a vegetable and pasta cooked in long-suffering repetition). i’m not making any kind of political or social statement about marriage or wifely duty or sharing of domestic chores (and it should be said that over the last 4-5 months the boy did more than his fair share of the cooking, among other things); all i’m saying is that upon opening my wedding presents, the ones i got more excited about pertained to an old love (books) paired with a new one (the idea of cooking).

related, but off-topic: i also got my beloved kitchenaid mixer for the wedding, and it has exceeded my non-cooking-experience expectations.  it seriously rules.  also?  it’s the color of pistachios.

i mean, just look at it…

i digress.

where was i??  yes, falling in love with books; cookbooks, books that will magically make me a cook.

but then, i didn’t cook anything out of them.

i’m not sure why, but i have a theory: recipes are…intimidating to me.   i’ve followed recipes before, sure, usually in some pre-planned ordeal that takes me several hours, special trips to the store and way too many dishes; however, recipe books are particularly intimidating.  especially bound up like that, in huge volumes that taunt me, they dare me to just try to make something that looks like anything in the book.

apparently i give voice, thought and an attitude to inanimate objects.  inanimate objects that mock me.

so today i determined to crack open the first big volume to see if it, as it advertises, might contain my joy of cooking.

also, the boy really, really likes banana bread.

i looked for the banana bread recipe and found it (how thoughtful, this organized little book!) in the breads section.  i scanned the titles, looking for simple, plain banana bread.

i came up empty.

i looked again, and the closest i could come to something entitled “banana bread” or “plain old banana bread” or “hey, you, weird-intimidated-by-cooking-lady, here’s your freaking recipe”, but the only thing i found was a recipe for “banana bread cockaigne”.

or, as i read it in my mind, “banana bread cocaine”.

according to wikipedia an expert, cockaigne is not some extra ingredient that makes this a new dish, but rather:

“the author’s favorite recipes include “Cockaigne” in the name, (e.g., “Fruit Cake Cockaigne”), explained in the foreword to the 1975 edition as after the name of the Becker country home in Anderson Township, near Cincinnati, Ohio.”

so, instead of something special, this is just a REALLY good banana bread recipe, one that inspires people to eat the entire loaf.

or, as it will now be known in our home, banana bread cocaine.