My husband has given his stamp of approval to the blog nickname "Stinger". He likes the waspish connotations, as well as the cocktail reference. In fact, we've had lots of fun with stingers in the past, which, in case you don't know, can be made with many different kinds of base alcohol as long as you add creme de menthe. We made vodka stingers in college (they looked like listerine shots) and got a friend of ours so tee-rashed that he puked violent green all night long. I'm sure this happy memory is what my husband's new alias calls to his mind, so he loves it.

In other news, I tried out a variation on the classic banana tea bread recipe, with mixed results. It's a sort of tropical version, the requisite mushy bananas mixed with toasted coconut and chopped macadamia nuts. It's excellent when toasted, so-so at room temperature, and just generally not what I envision when I think of banana bread. But is that a bad thing? Sometimes I wonder if all my tastes were formulated in childhood, and I'm going to spend the rest of my life trying to convince myself that new doesn't necessarily equal bad.

Posted by Louisa Edwards at 7:49 AM