Gone Bananas!

It was a wonderful weekend, filled with lots of people, new friends, banana-nut bread, and reading. Penny arrived via Greyhound Bus lines late on Friday evening. Her bus was delayed a couple times along the way. She actually met a couple of Tongan Adventists traveling home from a work week in the Los Angeles area. They were friends of the Tameifunas in Garden Grove. It’s a small world after all!

Other than Penny’s arrival and stay, I enjoyed preaching at the Paradise Valley Church. Penny gave me a “7” for the early service, and a “10” for the later service. Go figure! I enjoyed giving the children’s story during the later service. I even stuck around for potluck and shared the meal with the pastor and his wife, Paul and Donna Gibson. They are wonderful people. They actually sat and talked to us. They even tasted my banana-nut bread. Yes, you heard right, my banana-nut bread—not only by virtue of ownership, but by virtue of the fact that I actually made it from scratch!

I am not sure I have enough time to go into details as to how it came about that I made banana-nut bread. Suffice it to say that I had about eighteen very dark and mysterious bananas that had been in the fruit drawer of my refrigerator for a couple of weeks. It was either toss them out or eat them. I did not want to eat them, since over-ripe bananas are slimy and disgusting to chew or maul or squish in your mouth. I decided, on a whim, to find an internet banana-nut recipe (the first one I saw) and make banana-nut bread with all the near-rotting bananas in my refrigerator.

Lesson learned: read the entire recipe before commencing the task. The result of not doing it, especially if you are a novice, is that you drop all the ingredients in a large metal bowl with no mixer and only a potato masher to mix with. It took a lot of elbow grease to finally mix those ingredients into a workable mixture that would actually mold into the loaf thingies that you put the batter in before putting them in the oven. The kitchen survived. The house did not burn down. I ended the venture at about 2 o’clock in the morning. I ended up with six loaves of very dense, but tasty, banana-nut bread. Have lots of milk available before sitting down to eat these special loaves. And have a phone nearby, in case of emergency due to accidental choking.

I sent a loaf back to California with Penny. I will be watching the evening news for updates.