Banana Bread Brief

Matt Wise's (simplified) Butter-Free Banana Bread

matthewwise.blogspot.com

Implements:
Oven
Loaf Pan (rectangular)
2-3 bowls (at least one large)
Fork, spoon, and/or whisk
Measuring Spoons
Cup Measures (fractional)

Ingredients:
Bananas (2, very ripe)
Walnut halves or pieces (1/2 cup)
Eggs (2)

Flour (1 1/3 cups, regular and/or whole wheat)
Salt (1/2 tsp)
Baking Soda (1/2 tsp)
Baking Powder ( 1/2 tsp)

Milled Flaxseed (10 Tbsp)
Cooking Oil (2 Tbsp; grapeseed, canola, corn, vegetable, etc.)
Sugar (1/3 cup)

Do it:
Preheat the oven. 350° Fahrenheit.
Mash the bananas. Set aside.
Grind or chop the nuts. Set aside
Mix the flour, salt, and leavenings.
Separately mix the flax, oil, and sugar.
Combine flour mixture with oil mixture.
Beat eggs and fold in, together with bananas and nuts.
Smooth into greased loaf pan.
Bake 50-55 minutes. Toothpick inserted in middle should come out clean-ish.

Eat. Repeat.

Health Food!?

Butter-Free Banana Bread

Printer- (and sanity-) friendly recipe minus pics & rambling.

This is my first food-related post, and the recipe related herein is totally awesome. I'm no Atkins groupie, nor vegan, nor a cholesterol- or fat-o-phobe, but believe in good, wholesome ingredients. The biggest thing I try to watch is my own diet is the ratio of total fat to saturated fat, which commercial food packaging makes easy to track. Generally, I aim to keep the U.S. Recommended Daily Allowance percent of "total fat" lower than "saturated fat". Since dairy fat is usually lopsided two-to-one on the wrong side of such an equation, I felt pretty glum the first time I made my own banana bread and saw it called for almost an entire stick of butter. Frowny face, indeed!

What could be done?

After about a year of tinkering, I came up with a product that still keeps the delicious texture of "original" banana bread, based on a recipe from the Joy of Cooking.

Butter is out, other delicious and healthy fats are in, bananas and nuts and whole grain flour are in. This recipe also happens to be salt- and sugar-reduced, though loses nothing by it.

Once you get the hang of it, you will be able to churn out a loaf in under fifteen minutes, minus baking time. This time around, I slowed down to take pictures and let my lovely son Emmett help out in a few places. He loves grinding the nuts, though tends to get distracted.

If you're quick in the kitchen, you can start the oven pre-heating to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, or if you're a little slower, maybe compile and prep some of your ingredients first:

Ok, the recipe:

• Thoroughly mash:

2 very ripe bananas (about one cup). I use frozen chunks (that I remember to thaw), so I sometimes have to guesstimate. If you have only perfect yellow bananas, doing this step first and adding 1-2 tablespoons of water to the mash will help it come to resemble the real thing by the time you're ready to fold in the bananas. Save for the last step.

• Chop or grind:

1/2 cup walnuts, or have your helper do it, then set aside. 

• Measure and whisk:

1 1/3 cups flour. I use about half whole wheat.

1/2 teaspoon baking powder. Aluminum-free if you're into that.

1/2 teaspoon salt. The salty kind.

1/2 teaspoon baking soda.

Whisk this batch together and set aside while you work with the fats and sugar.

• Measure and blend:

10 tablespoons milled flaxseed.

2 tablespoons cooking oil. (I prefer grapeseed)

The flaxseed exudes oil in the cooking process, and I find that blending a more conventional source helps with the texture.
1/3 cup sugar.




Mix.

You're almost done!

• Combine the flax, oil, and sugar with your flour/salt/leavening mixture from earlier.

At this point you might be weighing the big pile of dry ingredients against two eggs, some nuts, and some mashed bananas, and be tempted to add some water.
Be strong though, it'll come together when you...

• Fold in:

2 lightly beaten eggs
Chopped nuts
Mashed bananas... and Voilà!

Now you have an incredible, creamy batter just begging to be smoothed flat into a greased loaf pan and baked for 50-55 minutes. At 350°, if you recall. A toothpick inserted near the middle of the loaf should come out clean or nearly clean.

Take out the steaming loaf with all due care, cool it as much as you want, slice, and devour!

If you are the decadent sort and just can't resist an extra dollop of butter on top, just remember that it'll still be healthier than the original recipe, and the omega-3 oils and fiber will be helping behind the scenes even with the normal amount of calories.

These loaves can keep for over a week if refrigerated, but why would you want to do that?

Let me know what YOU think.

Concept of Self

I feel like the act of blogging is deeply personal.
Some folks manage to make it "all about the (food/art/sport/you-name-it)," but so often the author's personality intrudes, or in many cases a blog's entire existence is simply a shout into the void, "Ego sum!" or something like that... my Latin is pretty rusty.

It's been awhile since I've posted to this blog, although the technical wonders and parenting moments I tend to write about still abound. I'm working on an exhaustive list of automotive gas mileages (and electric ranges and efficiency ratings) that so far seems oddly lacking from the online world, but that's a pretty big project. My boy would like to think he's four years old already -- he snatched a candle saying as much out of the display while cutely pushing his shopping cart in our local grocery store (pic). Also, he knows more about engineering and the sciences than I probably did at ten, or twenty for some things. From cooking to simple levers and flying birds, I do what I can to coach the boy, and the rest he learns often as not from tearing things apart. 

Like father, like son I guess.

Obviously I think he's great.
OK, end ADDled cute kid moment (I'll restrain myself from including any pictures of good old Howie Dog) and back to talking about myself, which is the point of this post.

Anyone who's ever Googled themselves only to discover, to their horror, that DOPPELGANGERS HAVE STOLEN THEIR IDENTITIES probably knows what I'm talking about here. If you scope out the new "about me" bar on the right side of this page, you may notice that the current (7/20/2013) blurb is essentially a rant about people who aren't me.

According to the wonders of the internet, there's also a Matthew Wise in Colorado scamming single women for child support, the retired baseball player who spent just enough time in the show to snatch the Matt_Wise wikipedia entry, and even someone else who has the gall to participate in triathlons (although if you may note, I'm the one who's usually in the top ten percent of finishers ;) http://athlinks.com/racer/results/151486255).

Sorry to brag; it's just I feel so insecure. Honestly, I may not be the most important "me" out there -- maybe the Maryland psychologist has done some good work, or perhaps one of the people behind the 142 other hits on LinkedIn has done something of greater note than almost finish a Bachelor's degree in English.

It's kind of sobering; maybe I'll have to start that stand-up career or enter astronaut school after all.

"SQL Injection" Viruses Still Going Strong

Sometimes called "mass-injection attacks," this class of internet-based computer attack appears to be responsible for the recent crippling of St. Edward's University's "New Literati" online literary adventure. Although not technically a "virus" (though certainly malware), this type of computer bug infects web servers, from which it tries to exploit user traffic through various means, often redirecting users to other malicious websites that may try to trick them (via misleading pop-up alerts or various scare tactics) into downloading more directly exploitative software like fake Anti-Virus platforms. How the New Literati website became compromised is not yet entirely clear, but blogs and other web presences that are easily modifiable by relatively amateur computer users are frequent victims of such attacks. Naive data processing in basic webpage authoring tools is one way hackers gain access, where malicious code "escapes" its proper place in a computer and can gain access to system processes, as in this somewhat humorous attempt:

Hackers don't usually target traffic cameras, though; one of the last big outbreaks was the so-called LizaMoon attack in the spring of 2011, where possibly millions of websites were infected (PCWorld), and users of those websites were bounced around the internet (often unknowingly, in hidden website frames or invisible pop-up windows) until they were presented with this official-seeming notice:

And shortly invited (read: "extorted") to purchase a "solution":

Being hacked, scammed, or even targeted can be scary, but trusting random pop-ups is probably not the best way to soothe your fears. So watch your virtual backs, keep your anti-virus software up to date, but above all surf responsibly. (No (sorry), you are NOT the 1,000,000th visitor, nor have you won a prize. And pressing "Escape" is usually the best way to close an unwelcome faked system alert.)

Dinosaurs, Desktops, and Other Relics

I've already established that I might never buy a traditional TV or internal combustion engine ("ICE") car, and now find myself wondering about the venerable desktop computer. My school is leaning toward the "all-in-one" format for some computer labs, smartphones are on the rise, tablets are stealing marketshare from netbooks from laptops from desktops.

Even console computing is experiencing a resurgence in which a user has direct control over little more than a mouse, keyboard, and monitor, while storage and processing are largely handled over a network or by another remotely-connected device. Does "cloud computing" ring a bell for anyone?

Having fried my own little netbook, I recognize that desktops are still superior for flexibility and upgrade options, but wonder if they'll wind up dinosaurs maintained only by gamers and "power users" who need (or think they need) a half-dozen or more drives, or heavy-duty graphics cards.

I think that if a format other than desktop ever cracks the general business / commercial threshold, then desktops will certainly see downgraded prestige, but for now they're (barely) hanging in there.

Hypercapacitors

Ok, my little slice of the internet looks like it may be in danger of becoming The Electric Car Blog, but would that really be so bad?
Knowing my proclivities, my good friend Cameron Gordon (the actor, not the mathematician) shared with me this little blurb about the rise of cheap Supercapacitors / Ultracapacitors / Whateverintensifieryouwanttousecapacitors.

To clarify, these are not the devices that send your DeLorean back to the future, but big brothers of the little things inside your TV or computer that can make it hazardous to open the case months after the device was unplugged due to their ability to charge (and discharge!) rapidly. This technology has long seemed the obvious answer to the problem with electric cars -- even with reliably-spaced charging points, a long-distance trip becomes an exercise in tedium while you wait for your car's batteries to charge before you can speed off again. You may recall my last post about the Tesla Model S kerfuffle, where the New York Times reviewer failed to fully charge the batteries, thereby screwing up Tesla's mileage calculations and instigating the whole thing. (On a side note, perhaps it wasn't the BEST design strategy to have the car's dashboard interface read "Charge Complete" while the battery meter reads only 90%, but without such ambiguity, we wouldn't have all these fun semantic arguments to keep us entertained.)

And if you watch the video (hidden above under the Supercapacitors link), you may note that the graphene substrate used is fabricated using a consumer-grade Lightscribe DVD burner. So buy whatever kind of stock you want, or maybe just go to your local electronics dealer and see if you can corner the market.
And if you're not clicking all my links anyway, you're missing out.

(Note: the white lightning bolt car is a Shelby Aero EV. Not actually powered by capacitors... yet... cuz then it'd be even FASTER.)

It IS electric!

Wow, what a watershed week for the electric car! I try not to use exclamation points on this blog overmuch, but wow, wow, wow. Tesla Motors has gone to war with the New York Times, and seems to be winning.

It wasn't so recently that electric cars (or EVs) were "Three-wheeled bubble things that were slow and kind of silly" (Tesla promotional video), and that an American car driver who wanted to break free of internal combustion engines would have to build his own Frankenstonian conversion or do something silly:

Yes, that is a Porsche/bike.

Anyway, Tesla Motors made one of the first and best electric cars of the modern era, the Tesla Roadster.

0-60 in 3.9 seconds, 244-mile range. Bam.
The roadster was the motivating icon of the modern EV movement, paving the way for plug-in hybrids like the Chevy Volt and true EVs like the Nissan Leaf. While out of the everyman's price range ($109k base), the Roadster bridged the gap beyond the 1990s-era EV1 and marginal sub-consumer options like scooters and low-speed vehicles. And bridged it sexily.
Anyway again, Tesla's more sensible recent EV entry, the Tesla Model S, has been earning things like Motor Trend's Car of the Year (2013) Award while still being (unfairly?) panned by many parts of the mainstream auto industry. Tesla even sued the venerable British show Top Gear over staged breakdowns playing on public uncertainty about electric cars.
In the Times's recent article by John Broder, there are enough inconsistencies for Tesla to take real offense, and while their rebuttal seems a little touchy and riddled with overreaching conclusions of their own, I think it makes a very strong case. Re-rebuttals and meta analysis continue to fly in online news articles, but I think that Tesla has made its point and staked a claim for itself and for electric vehicles in the real world.

Sometimes there really is a sea change, and I think we're in the midst of one.

Buy stock now.