One of my favorites...

I love this video. I really don't care for the song in its original form, but as a piano solo, I think it's beautiful. The pianist is Maxence Cyrin whose music is worth checking out - he mostly covers pop songs in a very original/unique way. The movie clips are from The Mysterious Lady, a silent film from 1928 starring Greta Garbo.

Peel!

I cleaned out my freezer the other day and was surprised to find 15 bananas hiding out in there. When I buy bananas and they get too ripe for my taste (I like them most when they are still pretty green,) I freeze them to use later in banana bread. Obviously I hadn't made any in a while, so I decided to use some of them up today.

I'm proud to say it turned out really well. I made two loaves, so if anyone wants some, come and get it!


Here is the recipe I use. It is by far my favorite banana bread recipe. I came across it a few years ago, and haven't used any other since. It's called Banapple Bread because it uses a mixture of mashed banana and applesauce.

Banapple Bread
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
2 1/2 cups sugar
1 cup chopped walnuts or pecans (I don't ever use nuts with this)
3 1/2 cups flour
4 eggs, beaten
3/4 cup oil
2 tsp vanilla
3 ripe bananas, mashed well
add enough apple sauce to make 2 cups total

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour 2 loaf pans. Fill pans with equal amounts of batter. Bake 1 hour or until done.

Today, for a little variety, I added a couple of teaspoons of Chinese Five Spice Powder. Yummy.

Too cute

My sister and I used to do this same thing.

And The Winner Is...

Confession: I have a bit of a love affair going on with the Pulitzer Prize. I'm not really sure when or why it happened, it's just one of those things. I'm especially fond of the fiction winner and a few years ago I took it upon myself to read all the past winners in fiction. I still have a few to go, but it has been a fun reading list.

2010's winners were announced today. The winner for fiction was Tinkers by Paul Harding. I've never heard of the author or the book, but it sounds interesting. From Booklist:

A tinker is a mender, and in Harding’s spellbinding debut, he imagines the old, mendable horse-and-carriage world. The objects of the past were more readily repaired than our electronics, but the living world was a mystery, as it still is, as it always will be. And so in this rhapsodic novel of impending death, Harding considers humankind’s contrary desires to conquer the “imps of disorder” and to be one with life, fully meshed within the great glimmering web. In the present, George lies on his death bed in the Massachusetts house he built himself, surrounded by family and the antique clocks he restores. George loves the precision of fine timepieces, but now he is at the mercy of chaotic forces and seems to be channeling his late father, Howard, a tinker and a mystic whose epileptic seizures strike like lightning. Howard, in turn, remembers his “strange and gentle” minister father. Each man is extraordinarily porous to nature and prone to becoming “unhitched” from everyday human existence and entering a state of ecstasy, even transcendence. Writing with breathtaking lyricism and tenderness, Harding has created a rare and beautiful novel of spiritual inheritance and acute psychological and metaphysical suspense

The books that were shortlisted are: Love In Infant Monkeys by Lydia Millet and In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin. I'm not familiar with those two books and authors, either. So, I guess I know what to look for on my next trip to the library. I will read and report on them here. Happy reading!