Scribal Terror

Banana bread

This is the perfect banana bread. I've never even considered trying another recipe.

Mix in food processor – processing one ingredient at a time:

3 ripe bananas
2 eggs
½ cup softened butter
1 cup sugar
1 ½ T sour milk (i.e., milk with a dash of white vinegar)
juice of ½ lemon
¼ tsp salt

Blend till smooth, then add and blend in

1 cup walnuts

Combine with dry ingredients

2 cups flour
1 ½ tsp baking powder
½ tsp soda

Bake at 350 about one hour. The time will vary depending on how big the bananas are, how big the eggs are, etc. Just keep baking till a cake tester or knife comes out clean.

Check out Scott's recipe here.

Black raspberries

From the garden. Ain't they purdy?

Cherry cobbler

Made with sour cherries picked from my cherry tree this morning. I use the old Joy of Cooking Fluffy Biscuit recipe for the dough, then 3-4 cups of cherries, 1 cup of sugar, 1 T flour brought to a boil on the stove and poured over the dough. It all goes into the oven at 425 for 1/2 hour. When the cobbler comes out of the oven, I use a fork to break it up a bit so the cherry juice soaks through to flavor the biscuit, then sprinkle turbinado sugar over the top (because these are REALLY sour cherries).  And that's what's for dessert at my house tonight.

How to eat a pomegranate

With handy illustrations, here. Via Bits & Pieces

Deeply chocolate biscotti

I'm making these. They aren't classic biscotti because they have butter in them, but that will make them a little easier to snack on without dunking. They're in for the first bake now. I'll let you know how they turn out, but the dough is super-chocolatey!

Et voila!

They're delicious and have just enough crunch to be more biscotti than cookie. The recipe is definitely a keeper.

Tip: If you use salted butter, be sure to reduce the salt in the recipe to about 3/4 tsp. That's what I did, and they came out perfect, but even a hint more salt would have been too much.

Especially for Jake

But not for dummies:

1. What do bagpipes represent in medieval art?
2. What do bunnies represent in medieval art?
3. What are the possible meanings of the word "coney"?

Friday the thirteenth, 1307

On Friday, October 13, 1307, King Philip IV of France ordered the arrests of Jaques de Molay, Grand Master of the Knights Templars and sixty of his senior knights in Paris. Thousands of others were arrested elsewhere in the country. After employing torture techniques to compel the Templars to "confess" to wrongdoing, most were eventually executed and sympathizers of the Templars condemned Friday the 13th as an evil day. -- Infoplease

"Of the apple"

Apples are rarely all red. Usually they're speckled, like the one in the picture. In other words, they're "dappled," a word which also means speckled or spotted -- but literally means "apple-like" or "of the apple" -- or d'appled like an apple. In French, the word for dappled is pommelé, literally "appled."

Gray horses with white flecks in their coat are called dapple grays for that reason. In German, the term is apfelgrau (apple-gray).

All of which reminds me of a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) called "Pied Beauty":

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

And, by the way, the word "pied" is derived from "magpie," a black-and-white bird, so it means parti-colored. The magpie is also known for collecting random objects and secreting them. This may be the origin of the word "pie" (the food item) because originally pies contained a combination of fillings whereas pastries contained single fillings. 

Wherefore, if you put dappled and pied together, you get apple pie. With birds in it.

And the horse you rode in on

A random paragraph from the felony theft trial of Mary Poole, 1699, from the searchable Proceedings of the Old Bailey:

Another Gentleman said, that about seven Years since, he was Riding on a Hand-Gallop*, upon Sutors-Hill, between Graves-end and Rochester he met the Prisoner; she said, that for all he rode so fast, he was but going a Wenching**, and she would soon over take him; with that he turned back and gave her a Cut with his Whip, and Rode away as fast as he could, but had not gone Forty yards from her, but his Horse fell down, and she overtook him; with that he said, he thought she was a  Witch, and had bewitched him and his Horse. There was divers other People who said they had been Juggled out of their Money by her. She had little to say for her self, the Jury found her Guilty .

Via Ace

* a controlled gallop

** cruisin'

Trust and oxytocin

PsychCentral reports:

Investigators have discovered the neurophysiological basis of human trust and the reaction to it being breached. 

In the study, scientists were able to prove the hormone oxytocin plays a vital role toward the sentiment of trust, even after a betrayal.