banana muffins

Yesterday morning Zoo Boy came in while I was typing away here at the computer, a book in his hand. (He regularly tests my policy of I'll-drop-anything-to-read-to-you.) The book was Eating the Alphabet by Lois Ehlert, a regular favorite of ours. As I read to him, J came wandering in, and when I finished the last page, asked if he could read the book. He took it and read the first couple of pages, then, getting to "Banana" he suddenly piped up "hey, can I have a banana?"

Banana in hand, he strolled back down to the bedroom and hung out around my chair, reading over my shoulder (something I'll never get used to -- there's something about having the words you are typing echoed back into your ear that is extremely disconcerting). I suggested he find something else to do. He suggested making Banana Muffins. I threw a glance over my shoulder at him to make sure he was serious (he's a bit of a joker that way), but he looked back steadily at me, without the sly "watch, I'll get her going" look that he hasn't yet learned to mask when he's trying to pull a fast one on me. He repeated "We could make banana muffins." I went back to my screen and muttered in his general direction "yeah, I guess we could, if we had a recipe, a muffin pan, and the ingredients".

Mind you, asking to bake is a perfectly reasonable request that many kids make, especially homeschooled kids who often learn more about weights and measures in the kitchen than the average kid learns in the classroom. However, these are MY kids. That means they live with me, the fabled Mom Who Doesn't Cook. (Yes, she really exists, and she is me.) They also happen to be exceedingly picky eaters who don't, in general, ever try new things. And they'd never had a banana muffin before. It came as a bit of a surprise to me that they even knew there was such a thing as a banana muffin.

Undaunted at my casual attitude at his great idea, J hunted up a cookbook (First Meals by Annabel Karmel, a cruel joke of a gift from some well-meaning baby shower guest), and lo and behold, found a recipe for Banana Muffins. He triumphantly shoved the open book between my eyes and the computer screen. I sighed and followed him to the kitchen in search of a muffin pan, which I was pretty certain we didn't own, realizing that offering to buy him a banana muffin at the grocery store wasn't going to cut it.

We spent awhile rifling through my cupboards, but as I strongly suspected, there was no muffin pan to be found. I took a look at the recipe and realized that we didn't have quite a few of the ingredients either -- you know, exotic things like Flour. And Baking Powder. Bananas we had. I told him that we could go to the grocery store and buy the things we needed today, then make the muffins tomorrow. He chime in "OR, we could go to the grocery store and buy the things we need, AND make the muffins today." Ok, the Boy Who Doesn't Like To Be Around Food is actually showing a culinary interest. It was time for me to suck it in and run with it.

So off to the grocery store we went, list in hand. J picked out the ingredients we needed. I picked out a muffin pan that was half the price of the one he wanted to buy. I also had to buy measuring cups and spoons -- oh, we own some, but most of the sizes have been used to clean out fish tanks, medicated ponies, and worm dogs. The rest have teeth marks in them from a cat with a plastic-chewing fetish. I bought a sifter, with a strong feeling that it may wind up in the sandbox this summer.

At the check-out, J detailed our muffin-making plans to the cashier. I heard her mutter "pretty expensive muffins" as she rang up the total. I commented that perhaps we'll get more than one muffin batch's use out of the materials, but then laughed at the concept myself. As we rolled our cart of baking implements away, she called after us "Good luck with the muffins!" I'm hoping she didn't hear my involuntary reply, "Thanks, we'll need it".

We set right to work as soon as we got home -- J is savvy enough to know that he'd need to keep me moving on this one. I washed up the new pans, cups and spoons, and laid the ingredients we needed out on the counter while J read the recipe to tell me what we needed (see photo above).


The kids took turns mashing the bananas.











And measuring out and sifting the dry ingredients.









We used the mixer (I actually own one! Imagine my shock!) to cream the butter and sugar (after a quick consult with Mimi -- my mom, an experience cook and baker, proving that culinary skills are not genetic -- to trouble-shoot our butter-is-too-cold-to-cream problem), then took turns adding the dry ingredients, and finally the bananas. Then we scooped the mix into our shiny new muffin pan, and popped them in the oven to bake.


Rumor has it that they are pretty good muffins. I'll never know, as I am deathly allergic to bananas. J didn't wind up liking them, but he DID try them (which is more than I can say for Zoo Boy, and fairly atypical for J even). We had some friends over today, and it was nice to have fresh baked goods to offer them (even though I thought I might need to do CPR to revive them when they found out I'd baked....).

I'm secretly hoping this sort of activity will cultivate a love of cooking in my kids. The reason we had them in the first place was because we need cheap farm hands. But free kitchen help would definitely be a bonus.