if there is one baked good that epitomized my childhood, it would be banana bread. none of us liked bananas with even the smallest brown dots so my mother made it on the regular, protecting us from the grisly fate of biting into bruised, mushy bananas with long strings of whatever those gross strips are that seem to appear on older bananas. we liked our bananas firm and safely tinged in green. luckily, older bananas make the best bread. we think her original recipe came from sunset magazine, but all the copies i have are in her handwriting, so that has not been confirmed.