Double, Double Toil and Trouble

Yesterday I decided to do a little baking. Everyone in the house has a sweet tooth, and no sweets = cranky dudes. (OK, and an even crankier Mom. There, I admitted it. Are you happy?) So, I dutifully put on my apron and got my Suzy Homemaker on.

I wanted to make some peanut butter cookies. DSguy had requested them recently. After spying some just-about-to-go-bad bananas, I thought better of it. Wouldn’t be prudent.

Out came the Betty Crocker cookbook, and I was whipping up banana nut bread in no time. You’ve just got to love the Betty Crocker cookbook. It’s practically impossible to screw up one of those recipes. They could have titled it “Idiot-Proof Cooking.”

Speaking of Betty Crocker, I love seeing the progression of clothing styles and hairdos she’s had over the years. My copy of the cookbook was my great-grandmother’s, and it was printed in the 70’s. On the back cover is Betty, wearing a bubble flip hairdo and high-necked collar with a red blazer. Her expression is somewhat warped, perhaps alluding to the pain of having lived through the dark decade following JFK’s assassination and the U.S. involvement in Vietnam…no, wait. That’s just the melted imprint from that time I set the book on a hot burner.

You can take a peek at Betty’s style evolution here: http://www.cookbkjj.com/college/betty_crocker.htm. Thank goodness it only shows her picture up through 1986! I’m afraid to see what the 2010 version looks like. So help me, if Betty shows up looking like Lady Gaga, I’ll wear a meat dress! But, I digress.

After I set the banana nut bread out to cool, I remembered the two large, beautiful, home-grown zucchinis sitting in my fridge. No, I didn’t grow them myself. I’d be hard pressed to grow a cactus. They came from the garden of a lovely lady in our church.

Prudence won out over peanut butter cookies once again, as the thought of rotting green squash in the crisper drawer was not particularly appealing. Use ‘em or lose ‘em! I had just the recipe for zucchini—“yummy muffins” they were called. Having already tasted them at a Bible study, I knew they would go over well with the dudes.

I had quite a bit of zucchini, so I’d better double the recipe, I reasoned. I grabbed the largest bowl in the house and hefted it on to the kitchen counter. I read down the ingredient list…and found spotty bananas were required. Doesn’t that just figure? I just used all the bananas in banana nut bread! Classic. All that shredded zucchini still had to be used, so I traipsed down to the grocery and bought more bananas.

Alright! I finally had everything I needed to actually make the muffins. I started adding items from the list in double portions. I began to worry when I was two-thirds of the way down the ingredient list and the bowl was full to capacity. Somehow I managed to pile all that stuff into the bowl, but I couldn’t quite figure out how to stir it without dumping batter all over the place.

Think. What do I own that is larger than this monster bowl? There was only one solution. I had to transfer the mix to my stock pot.

It all fit, but the effect was reminiscent of Macbeth’s witches stirring their brew in a cauldron. “Double, double toil and trouble!” How ironic. I did double the recipe—and boy, did it bring toil and trouble.

I think I’m set for muffins until next June.