A fun Cooking day

Becca and I were having a fun cooking day today, and for starters I made some banana bread from some soon to be yucky bananas. This brought about a revelation. I decided to make my usual recipe from the New York Times Cookbook, and Becca said, “You can’t. You don’t have the cereal.” “It doesn’t have cereal in it,” I said. “Yes, it does,” she who is always right said. (But not this time!) It turned out that for years, she has been thinking she was making the same recipe I always made in her youth, and I thought so too, but there are two recipes in the book, and they are on pages behind one another rather than across from one another, so we both thought there was only one and that we were both making it. She gave me the secret of her secret “greasing the pan” substance. This is a goo made up in batches which last quite a while, and grease quite a few pans. The ingredients are pictured – equal parts flour, Crisco, and cooking oil, and then a little blob of lecithin – all stirred till smooth. You then save it in some sort of cute tin like the one we use, shown here. I knew she made this concoction, and that it worked very well, but was never au fait to the particulars until today. And it did work well. The banana bread fairly leapt out of the pan when I asked it to.
Later we made black olive gnocchi – a recipe from the NYT - carrot salad and sautéed zucchini. The gnocchi had olive tapenade as an ingredient. I love olives in any form, so I was shocked when I tasted this and it was disgusting. The gnocchi dough was a little disgusting as well, so I was worried. Rebecca said, “ Never fear, they will taste better when cooked.” As usual (see above) she was right and they were delicious. I was a little undone by the time they were done, and so there are no pictures. While they were delicious, they were kind of ugly, so that may be just as well.