Banana Bread Obrigada

This week’s crazy story involved cooking. Since I am leaving Joao Pessoa soon and moving onto Fortaleza to start research (finally!), I wanted to do something nice for the professor and everyone in her lab, who have helped me out so much while I’ve been here.

To thank the Professor and the Lab, I invited everyone to a coffee break, promising everyone coffee and homemade banana bread, or so I thought. Just a little back ground on this story, so you can fully appreciate what is to come next. First, the professor and I have had some difficulties lately, due to the fact that I still don’t have a permit to do my research in Ceará. Needless to say it’s been a frustrating process especially as the time to start my project is drawing near. So I was hoping that this coffee and banana bread effort on my part would help smooth over some ruffled feathers on both parts. Ok, the second behind the scenes information you need to know is about my living situation. So I live with one of the undergrads from the lab and her cousin. And occasionally the undergrad's parents. After two months of living in this apartment I’m still confused as to when, why and if the parents sometimes live in the apartment. Mostly it’s just been the dad that stays at the apartment for an occasional night, always unannounced it seems and usually just for one night. However, the father and mother turned up on a Sunday night this week, and stayed for a few days.

The first night the parents were in town, the daughter cooked dinner for us all. To make a contribution I decided to test out my recipe of banana bread, to see if it would go over well and to see if I should indeed make it for the Lab. I was able to find most of the ingredients for the banana bread in the grocery store- one ginormous bag of flour, check. Eggs- check. Bananas-check. Sugar-check. Vanilla (baunilla in Portuguese)- check. Baking soda (bicarbonato de sodio)-check. The only thing I had trouble finding was chocolate chips, cause everyone loves a little chocolate banana combo. I searched and hunted through the entire grocery store and was only able to find little round white and milk chocolate balls in a little package mixed together. Not quite chocolate chips, but good enough. Now I have all my ingredients, I go back to the apartment and while my roomie cook’s dinner, I work on my banana bread. The first hurdle is that there are no official measuring utensils. No teaspoons, no tablespoons, no measuring cups, nothing. Now I can’t speak for everyone’s cooking experiences, but the way I learned from my mom and from other’s is that you follow a recipe and generally abide by the measured amounts. So with nothing more than a plastic cup generally used for drinking to try to determine measurements, I warily set off mixing my ingredients for the banana bread. My roomie turns on the oven, I find a nice looking round baking dish and an hour later voilah, my first baking attempt in Brazil is complete. It looks good, it smells good, and thankfully according to everyone at the dinner table, including myself, it tastes pretty good too.

Ok now, kind of back to the story at hand. So I manage to talk to the professor and we agree on the day and time for the coffee break. I send out an email to everyone in the lab ~ 14 + people, inviting them to coffee and homemade banana bread. I go home, make the banana bread again and leave it over night to cool, on the counter, next to the plate with two slices of my previous banana bread. The apartment goes to sleep. The next morning, I wake up, go downstairs and find that my roomie’s parents have eaten half of my newly made banana bread and cut large wedge-like chunks through the remaining bit. Shock. Horror. Anger. Frustration. My peace offering to the professor! My demonstration of gratitude for the Lab! My new banana bread! And here’s the kicker- the two pieces of banana bread left from the other night, are still there, where they had been the night before! Although instead of looking like they are still edible, the parents have put used napkins and bread crusts on this plate, and on top of the untouched banana bread, rendering them unusable for the Lab. Not only is it bad enough that half of my new cake is gone, the way the rest of the banana bread is cut makes it near-impossible to cut smaller pieces than the six wedge-shaped ones left. Now let’s recall that I invited over 14 people to this little coffee break. It’s the morning of, I don’t have enough banana bread and I don’t have time to run to the grocery store to get more bananas to make a new bread! What will the professor think? She’ll think I’m rude inviting all these people and then not having enough banana bread. Disaster, Impending Doom! Full-fledged panic sets in for about 5 minutes.

Ok now we’ll fast forward to the end of this story, which is happy. I manage to cut what was left of the banana bread into 6 more slices making the total slices 12. Thankfully not all 14+ people turned up to the coffee break. Everyone enjoyed the banana bread, the coffee and it all ended well. Several people joked they wanted to marry me because the banana bread was that good. The professor appreciated my gesture, it smoothed things over and everything is good. Whew, what a relief. Baking part 1 in Brazil a success!