No More Banana Bread, Please (or what to do with your uber-ripe bananas)...Banana Oatmeal Fritter

 So, in church this morning, I found myself pondering how exactly I was going to use the seriously over-ripe and darn-near-soupy bananas that I had cut up and frozen last week in order to stop their march toward sugary rot.

Yes, yes, I know, I should have been paying attention to the priest. I was, I promise! I was totally engrossed in the whole thing right up until the end, when three babies/toddlers around me started wailing and cooing and yelling and I couldn't hear a Pete's-blessed thing... so instead of fuming self-righteously about the lack of parental discipline in church these days, I decided to focus on my banana issues instead.

Banana bread is, of course, an old standby. But I really didn't want to make banana bread--or bananananana bread, as Dimetri Martin might say. I wanted something different.  A blog-friend of my sister's posted an awesome-looking recipe for banana hazelnut scones... but I had too many bananas, and they were way too ripe for individual, non-smooshed chunks in the scones. Plus, I didn't want to do a quadruple recipe and I had no hazelnuts... so that recipe is still on a back burner for now, until I can do it right.

Instead, I found myself pondering my grandma's donut recipe. I thought, "hey, I wonder if I could work bananas into Grandma's recipe?" And then I thought, "I don't want to roll and cut the donuts. It seems like bananas would work better in fritters. If my sister can do it with sweet potatoes, I can surely do it with bananas." And then I thought, "I wonder if I can work oat flour in." Then church was over and I had to wait for a few minutes before I was safely in the car on the way home and could ponder how best to accomplish this banana fritter business.

"I just need to change this, and this, and this," I thought to myself, tapping my hand restlessly on my knee and making my husband nervous. "And add this and this. Oh, and this. And it will be a wet dough, so it will need to chill before I fry it...."

And when I got home, the experimentation began.

I started by creating "oat flour" by pulsing old-fashioned rolled oats in my food processor until it resembled coarse flour--but I intentionally left some haphazard, almost-whole oat chunks in. I mixed the buttermilk in with the oats so that they could hydrate while I mooshed the bananas well with a fork and incorporated their freezer-thaw liquid. Then I added them to the buttermilk/oat flour mix and set it aside for the flavors to percolate.

I prepared the rest of the ingredients and then mixed and tasted, adjusted and added. Once I was satisfied, I put the batter in the fridge to chill for a little while to make it easier to work with when I was ready to fry.

And then came the sacred moment. I reverently broke out one of my most prized possessions-- a deep fryer my grandma had given to me for Christmas a few years before she passed away-- a deep fryer that my mom grew up frying donuts in every fall--a tradition that mom and Grandma kept up with us grandkids-- a deep fryer that we think came to my grandma as a wedding gift way back in 1945... and now, a fully-functioning antique.

When we moved the last time, I had it set aside on the kitchen counter. The movers were sweeping through the kitchen, wrapping up dishes and plates and china. When the packing-man laid his hands on the deep-fryer, I stopped him.

"Be careful with that," I told him. "Everything else you're packing is replaceable. That's not. It's a family heirloom."

He started to laugh, but then could tell from my face that I was serious.  He just nodded and quadruple wrapped it and packed it in a box of its own.

Anyway, it's a big deal to me when I bust out Grandma's fryer.

My first fritter was too big... it was tasty, but raw in the middle. So I sized it down to my smallest disher. I suppose it's probably between one and two tablespoons. I ran another test, cooked it to the far side of golden, and waited for it to cool before I tossed it in cinnamon and sugar. Perfect.

The way the fritters kept disappearing from the "finished" pile before I could count them, I know that Sean felt the same way.

And as an homage to my grandma, who left us just over a year ago, I have decided to actually post the recipe. I know. Incredible, huh?

Here you go... Banana Oatmeal Fritters--Grandma style.

2 cups oat flour
3 cups all purpose flour (plus or minus)
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 tablespoons freshly grated nutmeg
2 cups mashed bananas
1 cup buttermilk
3 eggs
1 cup sugar
1 tbs vanilla
2 tbs vegetable oil

Mix the oat flour, buttermilk, and bananas in small bowl, set aside to hydrate. Mix the rest of the dry ingredients together in another bowl. Meanwhile, beat eggs, sugar, oil, and vanilla together in the bowl of a stand mixer fit with the whisk attachment on high speed until light lemon color and slightly frothy. Switch to the paddle attachment. Alternate adding the dry ingredients and the wet ingredients, starting and ending with the dry flour. It will come together in a wet, sticky dough. When you scoop it with your spatula, it should cling to it, but still drip off veeeeery slowly, in a kind of stretchy way (if that makes any sense). If you're worried it's too wet, add a little more flour.

Put the dough into the fridge to chill for at least 30 mins.

Heat several inches of oil to 375 degrees or so. Prepare cinnamon sugar mixture in a large zip-top bag.

Drop a tablespoon or so of batter into the hot oil (like I said, I used a small disher, ice-cream scoop style). Turn occasionally, fry to the far side of golden. Remove with a strainer or slotted spoon. Let cool on a cookie sheet lined with paper towels and test when cool enough to eat. If it comes out all right, start frying fritters in batches, careful to not overload the oil--let the fritters have space.

When mostly cool, shake in the cinnamon sugar... and enjoy! It should be dense but moist, doughy but cooked, and entirely delicious!