It’s Not ALL Computers and Tea
January 28, 2007
Sometimes it’s bread. Banana bread. Date-nut-banana bread, to be exact. It’s 12:30 on Sunday afternoon and the bread has to bake for an hour and a quarter, so that gives me plenty of time to Do What Needs To Be Done.
Such as updating my blogs. Mailing my insurance premium payment. Paying the rent. Reregistering my trailer at DMV.
Or not. Just sitting outside with a good book. Well, not really a book. You see, one of the big drawbacks to living in a 28-foot travel trailer (or caravan, for you folks on the other side of the pond), is that I have very little room for storing books. And since I am an strong—nay, voracious—appetite for books, it’s a particularly bad problem.
Enter Project Gutenberg, the the first (and largest) producer of free electronic books or ebooks. Project Gutenberg has a library of over 2 million books available for download in plain text format. I combine texts from Gutenberg with a couple of nifty programs, iSiloX and iSilo, and convert the files to .PDB format. I then transfer the files to my PalmPilot and I have a handy portable library that travels with me wherever I go. And with a 512-Mb memory card in my Palm, I can carry a lot of books!
And if I can’t find what I want at Project Gutenberg, there’s always Ria Press Classic Books. Or Planet PDF.
In the mood for something scary? Go get the Collected Stories of H.P. Lovecraft from Project Gutenberg of Australia.
I believe that Project Gutenberg and sites like it represent the highest and best use of the Internet.
But back to the banana-date-nut bread:
Favorite Banana Nut Bread
This is a moist, buttery banana bread loaded with banana flavor.
INGREDIENTS:
1 cup butter or margarine
2 cups sugar
4 eggs
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons soda
4 cups flour
6 large bananas, very ripe, mashed
1 cup finely chopped pecans
1 cup chopped dates
PREPARATION:
Cream together butter and sugar. Add eggs, one at a time, beating after each addition. Sift dry ingredients together; add to creamed mixture. Stir in bananas and chopped pecans.
Pour banana nut bread batter into 2 well-greased loaf pans; bake at 325° for about 1 hour and 15 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.
This banana nut bread recipe makes 2 loaves.
