Banana Cookies — The Recipe That Used Up Three Overripe Bananas the Week of the Election

Day thirty-one of ninety. We are one-third of the way to sentencing. The X marks are accumulating on the closet calendar. The household is doing what it is doing, which is everybody putting one foot in front of the other and making no waves and producing the kind of quiet steady weeks that a probation officer’s report can stretch into a recommendation for a deferred sentence.

I want to put on the page that Mama voted on Tuesday. It was Election Day November eighth. The presidential election. Mama had not voted in a presidential election since 2008, when she voted for Obama because Aunt Tammy had told her she should and because Mama had decided, in 2008, that she was going to vote in every election going forward, which is a promise she did not keep. The 2012 election fell in the year she was working two jobs and could not get to the polling place. The 2014 midterms she did not even know were happening. The 2016 election was different. The 2016 election was something she had been thinking about, because she had been watching the news in the evenings while she folded laundry, and because she had decided some time in October that she was going to register again and vote.

I drove with her to the polling place at the elementary school on Tuesday afternoon after her shift — she has a car again, the old Cavalier she has had for ten years, currently making a noise that makes me think the muffler will need work soon, but currently still running — and the line snaked around the parking lot. She was in line for forty minutes. I sat in the car and did homework. She came back to the car at seven-fifteen with the I VOTED sticker on her work polo and her face had a different kind of light in it than it had had at noon. She put on her seatbelt. She started the car. She said, I have not done this in eight years, baby. I have just not done it. And tonight I did it. And then she did not say anything else on the drive home, and at home, she said, I voted, and I am not going to tell you who for, but I voted, and Cody, at the kitchen table, said, I’m proud of you, Mama. And nobody talked politics at the table, because nobody in our house has the energy for politics this year and the country has been the country it has been all year.

I cannot vote. I am fifteen. I had a long conversation with Mr. Briggs in English on Tuesday afternoon after class about whether voting actually matters when you live the way we live, on the kind of paycheck we live on, in the part of the state we live in, and Mr. Briggs — who is sixty-two and has been teaching at this high school since 1981 and has the gentlest voice of any man I have ever met — sat on the corner of his desk and looked at me and said, Kaylee, voting matters more for the people who live the way you live, not less. He said it twice. He said it the second time slowly, like he wanted to make sure I had heard it.

I have been thinking about that sentence for two days. Three years until I can register. I am going to register on June fifteenth, 2019, the day I turn eighteen, in the morning, before my Sonic shift. I am putting it on the calendar in pencil. Mr. Briggs said voting matters more for us. I am going to take him at his word.

And then there is the recipe, which is what most of you came for, and which is the small kitchen story I want to tell to balance out the civic one.

The bananas on the kitchen counter on Friday afternoon were so overripe that the kitchen smelled like bananas every time I walked through. We had bought four bananas a week and a half earlier, fifty-nine cents at Walmart for the bunch. We had eaten one. The other three had ripened on the counter past edible-by-hand, into the brown-spotted, thin-skinned, sweet-fragrant stage that bananas go through right before they get tossed. I have been hating banana waste since I was twelve. So I had been waiting for the right recipe, and the right recipe arrived a few weeks ago in the form of the Banana Cookies from A Couple Cooks.

The math first. Three overripe bananas, free (I had already paid for them). One large egg, eight cents. A quarter cup of melted butter, $0.30. A half cup of brown sugar from the bag, $0.20. A teaspoon of vanilla extract, about $0.15. A cup and a half of all-purpose flour, $0.20. A teaspoon of baking soda, a teaspoon of cinnamon, a half teaspoon of salt, all from the spice rack. Two cups of rolled old-fashioned oats from a canister I bought at Aldi for $1.79 (used about half the canister). A cup of semi-sweet chocolate chips from a small bag I bought specifically for this recipe, $1.49. Total: about $4.20 for ingredients I had to buy, plus pantry staples, all-in maybe $4.50 for twenty-four cookies. Less than nineteen cents per cookie. The chocolate chip cookies at the Walmart bakery are about $0.55 apiece. The math, in red ink, is the math.

The technique is the kind of cookie technique that does not require a stand mixer, which is good because I do not own one. You mash the bananas in a big bowl with a fork until almost smooth. You whisk in the egg, the melted butter, the brown sugar, and the vanilla. In a separate bowl you whisk the flour, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt. You stir the dry into the wet. You stir in the oats. You fold in the chocolate chips. The dough is not a stiff cookie dough; it is a softer, scoop-able dough that spreads a little on the pan. You drop heaping tablespoons onto a parchment-lined baking sheet. You bake at 350 for twelve minutes, until the tops are set and the edges are golden.

The cookies come out of the oven soft and chewy and slightly cake-like, with the bananas making them more like a tender oatmeal cookie than a crispy chocolate chip. The chocolate chips melt into the warm dough. The smell is bananas and brown sugar and chocolate and oats, which is, I have decided, the smell that bakeries try to capture in candles in the seasonal aisle and never quite manage.

I made twenty-four cookies on Friday afternoon while Mama was still at her shift. Cody came home from the auto-body shop and ate four standing at the kitchen counter. Mama came home and had two with coffee. I packed three in a small bag for my Sonic shift on Saturday morning. The older girls in the back kitchen at the Sonic ate them on their break. Brittany — who is seventeen and has been at the Sonic for a year and a half and does not give compliments freely — said they were the best thing she had eaten all week.

I want to write down what cookies do that bread does not always do. Cookies travel. Cookies fit in a sandwich bag. Cookies show up at the back kitchen of a Sonic on a Saturday morning shift and they tell the older girls that the inside-kitchen new girl is paying attention to them, that she made something at home and brought it to share, that the kitchen the Sonic crew works in is bigger than the small dirty linoleum-floor kitchen we work in five days a week. Cookies build small bridges between the kitchens we have to be in for money and the kitchens we have at home where we are loved.

The X marks on the calendar in the closet are at thirty-one. Mama voted Tuesday. Cody is at day thirty-one of consecutive sober nights at home. The wallet has $94 in it. The savings envelope is back to $30 because everything else has been going to Aunt Tammy in twenty-dollar payments. The pumpkin on the front step has gotten soft and Mama and I are going to chuck it in the trash this weekend. The leaves on the maple in the Hendersons’ yard are at the bright-red stage. The country is at the country we are in. The household is at the household we are in. Sixty days to sentencing. The cookies are gone.

The recipe is below, the way A Couple Cooks wrote it. The trick I want you to keep is the over-ripeness of the bananas — the spottier the better. Overripe bananas are sweeter, more fragrant, and easier to mash, and they make the cookie taste more like banana bread and less like a regular oat cookie. Use the bananas you would have thrown out. Make twenty-four cookies. Pack three in a sandwich bag for whoever you work alongside. Cookies travel.

Banana Cookies

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 12 minutes | Total Time: 22 minutes | Servings: 24 cookies

Ingredients

• 2 very ripe bananas, mashed
• 1/4 cup unsalted butter, softened
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1 large egg
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

Instructions

1. Preheat. Heat your oven to 350°F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper or lightly grease them.
2. Cream butter and sugar. In a large bowl, beat the softened butter and sugar together until light and fluffy, about 2 minutes by hand or with a mixer.
3. Add wet ingredients. Mix in the mashed bananas, egg, and vanilla extract until fully combined. The mixture will look a little loose — that’s normal.
4. Combine dry ingredients. In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt.
5. Mix the dough. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and stir until just combined. Do not overmix.
6. Scoop and bake. Drop rounded tablespoons of dough onto the prepared baking sheets, spacing about 2 inches apart. Bake for 11–13 minutes, until the edges are just set and the tops look dry.
7. Cool. Let cookies cool on the pan for 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack. They will be soft — that’s the point.

Nutrition (per serving)

Calories: 78 | Protein: 1g | Fat: 2g | Carbs: 13g | Fiber: 0.5g | Sodium: 52mg