Aloha Quick Bread — The Seventy-Eight-Days-Remaining Bake

Cody called collect Friday night during the unit’s nine-to-nine-fifteen window and Mama and I both got on the phone for the four-minute call, her on the wall receiver and me on the cordless. He told us his official release date had finally come down through the caseworker’s office: November seventeenth. A Saturday. Seventy-eight days from the Friday we were standing on. He said it the way someone reads the time off a clock — flat, no flourishes, like he was protecting the news from being too much. Mama held the receiver tight against her ear and said his name once, just “Cody,” and didn’t say anything else for a beat. Then she said, “Okay. Okay. We’ll be ready.” He said he loved us. The four-minute beep hit. The line cut.

Mama wrote November seventeenth on the kitchen calendar in red Sharpie, the kind we keep in the junk drawer for marking storage bins, and underneath the date she wrote “CODY HOME” in capital letters. Then she stood at the calendar for what was probably five minutes without moving. I went outside on the back porch and let her have it. When I came back in, she had the Sharpie still in her hand and was standing in the same spot. She said, “I need to clean out the back bedroom this weekend.” The back bedroom has been the laundry-and-storage room for the last seven years because Cody had moved out at twenty-six and nobody’s slept in it since. I told her I’d help. I started a countdown on a yellow sticky note on the fridge that night — just a number, 78, with a little box around it.

Saturday morning, after I helped Mama haul three plastic bins of out-of-season clothes out of the back bedroom into the garage, I baked an aloha quick bread to do something with my hands while my brain caught up to everything. The recipe is one I’d been wanting to try since Aunt Linda left the macadamias in August: a pineapple-coconut loaf with toasted nuts, a can of crushed pineapple drained and folded into the batter, sweetened shredded coconut on top, glazed with a thin pineapple-juice icing once it cools. The first loaf came out denser than I wanted it because I’d under-creamed the butter and sugar — my brain was on the calendar and not on the mixer, and creaming butter and sugar requires actually paying attention to the color change from yellow to pale-yellow-almost-cream. The first loaf was eatable. It just wasn’t right.

I made a second loaf Sunday morning and got it. Three full minutes of creaming on medium-high, the butter going from a deep yellow to that fluffy, almost-white pale-cream color that means the air is in there. The second loaf rose properly, the crumb was tender, the toasted macadamias kept their crunch even after the glaze went on. Two loaves is also a useful number to have around when you’re feeding a Mama who works doubles and a household that’s about to add a brother. I gave the dense practice loaf to the Bowman family next door — not Iris’s Bowmans, the other Bowmans, our neighbors who’ve been watching the house and bringing in the mail when Mama pulls a double — and Mr. Bowman called the next morning to say his wife had eaten three slices standing at the counter.

Wednesday at writing program, Marcus pulled me aside before the session started and told me my Cody piece had been formally accepted into the library anthology. Eight pieces total selected out of the ten of us — two people had been asked to revise and resubmit, which Marcus called “a kindness, not a rejection.” Mine was the longest piece at sixteen pages. They’d be printing the paperback the first week of November in a run of one hundred copies, which would be sold for five dollars apiece at the library front desk to fund next summer’s program. Then he asked if I’d be willing to read at the launch event — a Saturday evening at the central Tulsa Library, mid-November, with the public invited and refreshments and probably a hundred and fifty people in the room.

I said yes. He said the launch was scheduled for November tenth. I did the math standing in his classroom doorway with my hand still on the door frame: November tenth was seven days before Cody comes home. Two countdowns. One sticky note on the fridge already, and now a second one in my head.

Cream the butter and sugar like you mean it, three full minutes. That’s the difference between dense and tender.

Aloha Quick Bread

Prep Time: 15 minutes | Cook Time: 60 minutes | Total Time: 1 hour 15 minutes | Servings: 12

Ingredients

• 3 ripe bananas, mashed
• 1 can (8 oz) crushed pineapple, drained
• 2 large eggs
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup sweetened shredded coconut
• 1/2 cup chopped macadamia nuts or walnuts (optional)

Instructions

1. Preheat and prep. Preheat your oven to 350°F. Grease a 9x5-inch loaf pan and set aside.
2. Mix wet ingredients. In a large bowl, combine mashed bananas, drained crushed pineapple, eggs, vegetable oil, and vanilla extract. Stir until well blended.
3. Add sugar. Stir the granulated sugar into the wet mixture until fully incorporated.
4. Combine dry ingredients. In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt.
5. Fold together. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and stir gently until just combined — do not overmix or the bread will be dense.
6. Add mix-ins. Fold in the shredded coconut and nuts if using.
7. Bake. Pour the batter into the prepared loaf pan and bake for 55–65 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean and the top is deep golden brown.
8. Cool before slicing. Let the bread cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely before slicing. (Or eat a warm slice at midnight. No judgment.)

Nutrition (per serving)

Calories: 280 | Protein: 4g | Fat: 11g | Carbs: 43g | Fiber: 2g | Sodium: 210mg