i'd rather be baking

Let’s say you’ve been a casual runner for years, and decide it’s time to get competitive.

Let’s say you happily start training for a series of races, and all is well for about a month, and then you twist your ankle.

Let’s say your job puts you on your feet about 99.99% of the workday, which pretty much exhausts the amount of time you should really be stressing that ankle, limiting home-baking time to pretty much zero. Let’s say you need to squeeze things like boiling corn for dinner and chopping zillions of tiny vegetables for lunch into your limited kitchen time. Just go with me here.

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Ryan has a thing for blueberry muffins. You may recall the muffin extravaganza of 2009, which included quite possibly the world’s most perfect blueberry muffins. I wanted to make some for him, and I really should have stuck with the recipe I already knew and loved. But you know me, I can’t leave well enough alone.

My Google Reader is pretty much equally divided between ridiculous food and super healthy blogs, which is a pretty accurate representation of, well, me. The moral of the story is that we can’t all eat butter laden, crumb-topped morsels of deliciousness every morning. We have skinny jeans to wear and races to run. You understand.

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This week we’ve been in Utah for six months and can’t quite believe it. I’m not sure if it’s justified but I feel as though somehow we’ve accomplished something. Or I just want an excuse to make cake.

This is just the sort of homegrown cake that doesn’t really need a special occasion. It’s not fancy or glamorous but it sure is delicious. I received this recipe from my grandmother, who used to make it when I was growing up, but it’s originally from an old Betty Crocker cookbook.

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So. For the last week or so I’ve been trying to enjoy more of real life. You know, the non-Internet-based kind? Remember that?

It’s something I’m still working on, and I’d recommend it. Practically this means spending more time in my running shoes and in the sunshine, among other things. Exercise and Vitamin D are a beautiful thing.

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Everybody makes banana bread, right? That’s what I thought until I began bringing it to share with coworkers at various previous jobs of mine. People would go nuts. They couldn’t believe it. One lady told me that she makes her family banana bread from a boxed mix. What? I didn’t really know such things existed.

I was raised to believe that banana bread was what you did with those nasty looking, brown-spotted bananas that are otherwise completely disgusting. Mash them up, stir in some wet and dry stuff, stick it in the oven and something magical happens. That’s basically ten-year-old Laura’s understanding of the whole process.

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