Today, I noticed I had two very ripe bananas. They were so ripe, they were actually beginning to ferment. Well, there's only two things you can do with black, fermenting bananas: you can throw them away or you can make banana bread. I have countless recipes for banana breads and cakes, but I particularly like the one I MacGyver from a basic muffins recipe I got from epicurious.com years ago: it's easy and the texture is something between a bread and a cake.
As usual, today I tried to clean out as much from the refrigerator and pantry as I could. In addition to the bananas, I had half-and-half that was almost off, a piece of cream cheese with a bit of mold on top, and a jar of pumpkin spice that probably should have been thrown away last month (they say you shouldn't keep spices for more than a year). Well, what's the harm of slightly-off food since it's all going to be mixed and baked? The cream cheese is fine—I just took a quarter of an inch off the moldy part and threw the non-moldy part in with the half-and-half, egg, and bananas. Hey, it's all good. So here's the recipe.
Banana Muffins
2 cups of white flour (I added about two tablespoons more to compensate for the cream cheese)
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup sugar
1 egg
1 cup of half-and-half or milk
1/4 cup melted butter
1/4 cup cream cheese (optional)
2 black bananas (optional)
Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Either butter muffin pans or stick paper muffin cups inside. Or, if you're feeling very lazy like I was, just get out a 8-inch square baking pan and grease it (I was so lazy, I used the baking pan as my mixing pan too — hey, one less dish to clean up). In a bowl, put in bananas, half-and-half, melted butter, and cream cheese. Mix with a hand-held blender or just use a food processor. In another bowl (or in the mixing pan), put in all the dry ingredients and mix. Add the liquid mixture to the dry mixture and combine together until the dry ingredients are just wet (don't over mix). Put the mixture in the muffin tin or baking pan, and place in the oven. If you're making muffins, this should take about 20-25 minutes. If you're using the pan, you're basically making banana cake/bread, so check after 40 minutes. If the middle of the bread is still wet, bake for another 10.
The nice thing about this recipe is that you can turn it into almost any kind of muffin, blueberry, date, cheese, corn, etc. Just be sure to adjust the sugar depending on whether you make a sweet or savory muffin (if savory, only put in about 2 tablespoons).
So how'd it turn out? I'd give it a solid B.
An interesting aside, I'd printed out the recipe in 2001, and on the sidebar, there's an ad for a Cuisinart mini prep food processor. They wanted $40. Today, you can get one for around $36, so I guess the price's gone down — way down if you calculate in inflation. There must be a mental price barrier for things like food processors. BTW, the KitchenAid mini is really good.
