Sunday, gloomy Sunday

Things to do on a Sunday afternoon when your mood matches the gray November weather:

• Wrap yourself in a wool shawl.
• Turn football on, then turn it off because you don't care about the teams. Repeat every 10 minutes.
• Drink a cup of tea.
• Read design magazines.
• Pay bills.
• Eat half a bag of chocolate chips. Whoops, they are white chocolate, which means they don't contain whatever in chocolate is supposed to be good for your mood.
• Go online to check the temperature outdoors in case it's actually sunny and warm.

Mmmm ... cured meat.....

I'm on another cured meat kick. A while ago, it was prosciutto: I ate it with my fingers, I cooked with it, I couldn't get enough of it. Kind of an expensive habit. Now I'm on to salumi, which I think sounds pretentious, so I say, "salami-like things."

For lunch today, I had my Fra' Mani sopressata and Vermont cheddar sandwich. I eat this almost every day. I don't like sandwiches, generally, so when I find one I like that I can make at home and save myself some lunchtime angst and bucks, I do. This is an awesome sandwich. I don't know what sopressata is (I don't know if I want to know), but it's good. The Market Hall people sure know how to recommend salami-like things.

This evening I went to a friend's surprise birthday party at Adesso on Piedmont Avenue. Delightful to be returning to my old neighborhood, particularly to visit an eatery that I hadn't been to before. Adesso is new, in the new Il Piemonte building, a building I longed to live in because of its Piedmont location and palazzo exterior, but I didn't like it enough.

I did not know this until I got there: Adesso is a salumi bar. I opened the menu and saw more salumi-like things listed than I could count (the reviews say that there are more than 30). And I was there with a great group of people who like salumi as much as I do. We were pleasantly overwhelmed at the selection. So we ordered a chef's salumi platter, some cheeses -- and the cheeses were superb and a superb mix (and I am a cheesie) -- and then some panini, which also involved cured meats. The sausage panino was to die for. We were in heaven. And then they brought out the Baskin Robbins mint chocolate chip birthday cake, and we all got quiet as we ate it, focusing intently on the exquisiteness of our individual nostalgia trips.

As Joey would say, here come the meat sweats.

The banana pancake mystery

Brunch is pretty much my favorite meal. Carbs, sugar, salt (e.g., waffle, syrup, bacon). Like eating dessert with a little bit of dinner thrown in.

I'm not a great cook, but I'm pretty good at brunch basics. The first meal I hosted here was a brunch: two families, with kids. Chocolate chip pancakes and whipped cream, and plain pancakes and syrup for the more conservative. It was a hit. Everyone loved these pancakes.

My next meal was just with a few friends. Banana pancakes, blueberries, strawberries, two kinds of chocolate chips, whipped cream, and syrup. (I always serve bacon, too, to please the remaining taste buds.) Another hit. They said they were the best pancakes they'd had and encouraged me to invite them over next time I was using up an overripe banana.

One day I had a very ripe banana, and no one was coming over, so I made pancakes for myself. I like to make a full batch of pancakes and then save the leftovers to pop in the toaster oven later. I used the same recipe I've used my whole life, the "Griddlecakes" recipe from the Fanny Farmer cookbook. My cookbook opens to this page. (If I flip the pages, it also opens to the page for blueberry pie.) It was the same recipe I used for my hugely successful chocolate chip and banana pancake brunches.

The pancakes were awful. They tasted salty, bitter. I threw the entire batch out.

I double checked the recipe and decided I must have left out the salt, so the baking powder didn't rise or process or whatever baking powder does, so I figured I must have been tasting baking powder.

Next overripe banana: same recipe. I focused on adding the salt. And ... the pancakes were terrible. I was hungry, and they were perhaps somehow less bitter than the last time, so I doused them in syrup and ate them anyway.

This was a total mystery. How had the Fanny Farmer recipe stopped working? What was I missing? Do bananas mess with pancake batter, somehow, chemically? I had taken the short cut of not mixing the dry ingredients before adding them to the wet ingredients, figuring they all get mixed together in the end. Is that what broke it? I've made these pancakes a gazillion times, and I'm pretty sure I don't always (rarely, in fact) mix the dry ingredients first.

Next overripe banana: I carefully assembled the dry ingredients. And ... mystery solved.

The recipe calls for baking powder. Baking powder, as we all know, comes in a canister. Baking soda, on the other hand, comes in a box. Well, when I had gone to Trader Joe's to buy baking powder, I had grabbed the canister, had used the canister, had used the canister in all the pancakes I've made since I moved in ... and it turns out that Trader Joe's puts its baking soda in canisters. I'd been using backing soda all along. Pfffttthhh.

I made banana pancakes again this morning, this time with a new canister of baking powder. They were terrific, and, not surprisingly, were very different, with a lighter texture than all those other pancakes. The new mystery is: did the chocolate chips and whipped creams and berries and chocolate and syrup really mask the terrible flavor of those early pancakes? Did all of those people really not notice the bitter, salty, baking soda-flavored pancakes?

Fatty bananas?

Now that there is a Trader Joe's on College, I stop in spontaneously just because I can.

Found myself staring at the non-dairy frozen desserts wondering if they were any good. I once had a colleague who, no matter what I complained of, said, "Eat a banana." It's a great place to start. So, rather than picking a soysicle, I was considering the chocolate-covered bananas on a stick. A woman pushed past me to grab a box, so I stopped her to ask if they really were good or just weird. She said she loved them.

And they are really good. You feel healthy because you're eating a banana -- and they use ripe bananas, so they have flavor -- plus you have the treat of a little bit of chocolate.

Yum. How bad for you could this be? Can I have another? Two bananas are better than one, right?

Then the shock of reading the nutrition information. One hundred sixty calories and 3.5 grams of saturated fat -- 18% of the %DV. What's in that chocolate? As I slowly work my way through the box (I can't throw them out, right?), I wonder if I can just find some good chocolate and make them myself.

Hah! Not with chocolate! A bar of Scharffenberger 70% has 7g of saturated fat.

Or am I being unreasonable here? It's not like I look at other food labels -- maybe this is the healthiest thing I eat?