Footle and Grok

I just can’t eat over-ripe bananas

In my house, we either have too many bananas or none. When we have too many, they move from perfect to only-good-for-baking overnight. I talked about making frozen bananas on a previous post, but this time I wanted something different.

My hubby makes a fantastic chocolate chip banana bread, but that is his concoction, and I could never compete. I searched for a recipe that made a small amount, needed bananas, didn’t include chocolate, and could be made with ingredients I had in my pantry.

My go-to recipe website is Taste of Home, and it didn’t disappoint. I saved about ten different recipes and chose one to make with my bananas.

Banana Bread Snack Cake was simple to fix, made just the right amount for two people, and turned out delicious. I topped mine with vanilla frosting because I had a can that needed to be used up, but it would be great without it. You could add chocolate chips or nuts if you wanted. (I posted the recipe below, or you can find it online here.)

If you are looking for a way to use an over-ripe banana, I recommend Banana Bread Snack Cake. It is easy enough for everyday and fancy enough for company or a party.

Taste of Home’s Banana Bread Snack Cake

Total Time Prep: 10 min. Bake: 30 min. + cooling
Makes 9 servings

Ingredients
• 1-2/3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/2 cup water
• 1/3 cup mashed ripe bananas (about 1 small)
• 1/3 cup canola oil
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• Confectioners’ sugar

Directions
• Preheat oven to 350. In a bowl, combine flour and baking soda. In another bowl, whisk brown sugar, water, banana, oil, and vanilla. Stir into dry ingredients just until moistened. Transfer to a greased 8-in. square baking pan.
• Bake until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, 30-35 minutes. Cool on a wire rack. Dust with confectioners’ sugar.

Nutrition Facts
1 piece: 259 calories, 9g fat (1g saturated fat), 0 cholesterol, 147mg sodium, 44g carbohydrate (25g sugars, 1g fiber), 3g protein.

Do you look at the stars?

When I ran/walked at 4 a.m. every day in July, I often hunted for the Neowise comet* in the dark sky. Unfortunately, none of the bright points of light had a tail. I knew there were planets mixed in with the stars, and I began to wonder which was which.

I downloaded the Star Walk 2 app (it was a random choice), and the sky opened up to me. This cool app connects to your phone’s camera. When you hold your phone up to the object in the sky you want to identify, the app labels all the objects visible on the screen. It is amazing.

I learned that Venus, Uranus (which I couldn’t see,) Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter were in a line across the sky (the app showed the actual line on my phone.) Once I knew where these planets were, I watched them travel across the sky.

If you are outside late at night or early in the morning, I recommend the Star Walk 2 app. It’s fun to put a name to the objects in the sky.

*I never saw Neowise no matter how early I started. It was often cloudy, and even when it was clear overhead, there would be low fog. Plus, lights from town illuminated the eastern horizon, thus fading an already dim object. I ended up seeing the comet around 11 p.m. one night, which was nice but made for a tired run the next day.

Did you know the Dog Days of summer end tomorrow?

I always thought the Dog Days of summer were all in August, but it turns out they are from July 3 to August 11. In Ancient Rome, it was a time when dogs and men went crazy with the heat, and it’s when Sirius (the dog star) rises in the morning.

The end of the Dog Days doesn’t mean that summer is over or that the hot days are gone. Instead, August brings its own weather lore. The following list comes from a lovely website called gardendigest.com, where you can find plenty of monthly quotes and seasonal gardening advice (which I never use.) I wonder what sort of winter we will have based on today.

August Weather Lore

If the first week in August is unusually warm,
the coming Winter will be snowy and long.

For every fog in August,
There will be a snowfall in Winter.

If a cold August follows a hot July,
It foretells a Winter hard and dry.

So many books; so little time.

One of my goals while run/walking 300 miles in July was to whittle down my unlistened-to audiobook list. I tend to listen to a lot of podcasts, so I get behind with my Audible book list. Being out on the road every morning for about three hours gave me a lot of time to catch up.

Since today is Book Lover’s Day, I have listed the books I listened to and my rating for each of them. (5 is awesome and 1 is a waste of my time)

• Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation by Alan Burdick (4)
• Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein (4)
• The Library Book by Susan Orlean (4)
• The Moon: A History for the Future by Oliver Morton (4)
• The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet by Neil deGrasse Tyson (4)
• The First Love Story: A Journey Through the Tangled Lives of Adam and Eve by Bruce Feiler (4)

Okay, that wasn’t helpful. My favorite audiobooks are narrative nonfiction on a variety of topics, so it makes sense that I would like all these books. Also, I wouldn’t spend my Audible credits on just any random book, so I knew something about the book or the author. And one of these books (The Library Book) was recommended by good friends.

However, I have listened to some awful narrative nonfiction. Some I finished (Autonomy was a definite waste of my time), and some I started and returned. So, I think I got lucky to listen to so many great books while I completed 300 miles. If you are a book lover looking for a great read, I can recommend any from this list.

A while back, my hubby asked how pineapples grow.

My first guess was that they grew like coconuts or dates, high in a palm-like tree. I imagined a tall tree with lots of pineapples hanging off it. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I’m going to give a brief overview of pineapple growth (it’s crazy!). If you want to learn more, check out this website. If you want to see pictures of the process, Dole has an excellent line-up (see it here.)

The pineapple plant is short and stocky. They look a little like a yucca plant. A couple hundred flowers grow out of the top. For most fruit, this would mean a couple hundred fruits would emerge, but not the crazy pineapple. The hundred or so flowers create berries, and the berries join together and make one pineapple.  That’s right. Each plant grows only one pineapple, which is made up of multiple fruits.

It can take up to thirteen months to grow a pineapple. And each tree grows only one pineapple at a time. There are approximately 300 billion pineapples grown in a year, so there are about 300 billion pineapple plants. That is amazing.

I hope you read more about this crazy fruit. It may be a tasty addition to hams and fruit cups, but like most mass-produced items, it has the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Happy Wiggle Your Toes Day.

If you are somewhere where you can go barefoot, that is the best way to wiggle your toes. If you want some sole protection along with your moving digits, flip-flops are the way to go.

When I was a kid, we called the shoes that we wore at the pool or beach “thongs.” I have no idea when I started calling them flip-flops, but I think it was gradual. As thongs became connected with women’s bottom-exposing garments, it sounded weird to ask, “where are my thongs?” But why are they called flip-flops?

Flip-flop is an onomatopoeia (a word that sounds like the sound it represents.) When people walked, their shoes made a slapping noise that sounded a little like “flip flop.” They could have been called slap-slaps.

The flip-flop, as we know it today, became popular in the 1960s. However, sandals with thongs between the toes go back to the ancient Egyptians. The shoes worn around 4,000 BC had the thong between the second and third toe. The Greeks and Romans wore thong sandals with the strap between the first and second toes like we do today.  No one was calling those sandals “flip-flops.”

These fun, summer, toe-freeing shoes are still called thongs in Australia, so the name hasn’t completely disappeared. It should be noted that they call the women’s skimpy, bottom garment, the g-string, so there is no confusion.

There is a flip-flop holiday in June, but I think Wiggle Your Toes Day is the perfect time to slip on a pair of toe-freeing shoes. Plus, it’s hot out, and flip-flops are cool.

One of my favorite treats is delicious, with or without chocolate.

At Disneyland, when everyone else is buying a Mickey-shaped ice-cream bar, I always choose a chocolate-covered frozen banana. So yummy.

The best part about frozen bananas is how easy they are to make. I like to thickly slice a peeled banana and freeze it in a bowl. Sometimes I drizzle chocolate sauce on the frozen chunks, but the truth is, it doesn’t need it. Frozen bananas are a sweet treat all by themselves.

This is also a great way to use up bananas before they go into the banana bread mush stage. The sugars are concentrated, so the healthy banana tastes like dessert. It’s refreshing, and I’m not monkeying around.

Happy Anniversary, Mom and Dad!

They live where it’s triple digits hot, while I live where it hardly ever hits ninety. However, for me, any temperature above 70 is hot, so I always complain about the heat when Mom calls me.

In honor of my parents’ anniversary and the summer heat, I went looking for a hot quote. I found a great one from an unlikely source. Who knew Bruce Lee was a romantic?

“Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable.”

Bruce Lee

Here is to your unquenchable love.

Happy National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day.

I prefer eating chocolate chip cookie dough than the cookies themselves, but I can make a batch, enjoy some dough, and share the holiday with others by giving the cookies away. This is a perfect holiday.

I like to make cookies, but I actually make bars. I press the batter into a baking pan and cut them into squares once they are baked. This was a much-needed solution since my drop cookies always looked horrible. My bars both look good and taste good.

I don’t have a special family recipe, I just follow the recipe on the back of the semi-sweet chocolate chips. It is well-tested, and makes tasty dough.*

The largest chocolate chip cookie registered with the Guinness Book of World Records was baked in May 2003. The Immaculate Baking Company in Flat Rock, North Carolina, made a cookie that had an area of 8,120 square feet, weighed 40,000 pounds, and had a diameter of 101 feet. You can see the cookie here. It looks totally unappetizing.  I hope they invited a lot of people to eat it.

Have a chocolate chip cookie today, guilt-free. Or give one as a gift to someone sweet.

*I know you shouldn’t eat dough that has raw eggs in it. If this worries you, please don’t do it. So far, it hasn’t killed me, and I don’t eat a lot of the dough, anyway.

Poems about August are not happy.

I like to share positive and cheerful things, but poems about August tend to focus on the heat or the ending of summer, either literally or metaphorically. Poets also have a lot of say about August because the poems tend to be really long.

In the end, I picked the first one I read. It’s not overly happy, but it has great visuals, and it’s short. I hope your August is not just an ending of summer, but a new start for the rest of the year.

August

by Dorothy Parker