Miss “Nothing goes to the bin”

Among the reasons why I’ve earned the name “Miss” or “headmistress” at home is how I hate throwing food away and never want food to go bad. For a while now, I’ve had a bunch of bananas in my kitchen, and even after gifting some to my neighbors and eating most of them, I still ended up with overripe ones.

Normally, I love to make what I call banana salad (where I cut the banana and mix it with milk and groundnuts).

or frozen banana smoothie (where I blend everything and freeze it).

But then I reached a point where my tongue was just tired of tasting raw banana. Any little banana on my tongue felt like torture to my mouth. And it wasn’t just me; my brothers were also experiencing the same thing.

Realizing that time was ticking for these overripe bananas and really not wanting to throw them away, I just decided to bake banana bread. The problem with this was that I’ve never baked before and don’t even have an oven. But then for the recipe, I recalled that Milly made muffins sometime ago, so I looked for that post, took a thing or two from google and then just decided to make use of what I had; a microwave.

Ingredients I used:

• overripe bananas

• a teaspoon of baking powder

• 4 tablespoons of flour

• 3 teaspoons of sugar

• half a teaspoon of vanilla extract

• an egg

• 3 tablespoons of milk

• butter

Even after getting all the ingredients, I was very hesitant because I had no idea what I was doing. Right from the onset, I knew that although the whole point was to save the overripe bananas from going to waste, any little mistake was going to mean wasting more than just a bunch of bananas. This thought alone made me pay attention to what I was doing.

This is what I did:

• I melted a little butter into a microwaveable bowl and then just mashed my banana in a mug using a fork.

• I added the mashed banana, the flour, sugar, milk, and the egg and then mixed and mixed and mixed.

Then something told me to add more flour because it was too liquid, so I did, and then later found out I shouldn’t have listened to that “something.” But I still learned a new thing anyway.

• I later added my baking powder and vanilla extract and kept on mixing.

• I mixed till I felt the consistency I was seeing was okay for me, and then I put it in the microwave for 2 minutes.

That was the longest 2 minutes of my life. All that while, I just stood right in front of the microwave trying to see what was going on inside.

After hearing the stop sound of the microwave, I began laughing because it was a moment of truth. It was time to know if I was indeed Miss “nothing goes to the bin”.

After taking the bowl from the microwave, the aroma made me so happy and it felt like I was in my proud minimalist moment, hehe.

I then cut it into triangles and served them with honey.

The Taste Test

I called my brothers to come taste it while I left the kitchen to take pictures of my bread, and by the time I returned, everything was gone. That alone was enough to let me know how yummy it turned out.

We all started laughing because it dawned on us that the same banana we wanted nothing to do with some hours ago was what had finished in minutes.

Although it was my first time baking banana bread, I think I did alright. I also achieved my aim of not wasting food. And the cherry on the cake? Now I know how to bake banana bread, which only means one thing: no overripe banana that finds its way into my house will see the four corners of a bin.