I've been eating a lot of bananas lately. And not just for an afternoon snack, or with my cereal in the morning. No, I wake up at 5:30 a.m. on Saturday mornings, try and gag down a banana, and go back to bed for an hour. This sounds odd to most, but for someone who overdosed on the starchy fruit as a little girl, it's particularly strange and unpleasant. When I turn out my bedside light on Friday night, I can't help but dread the looming alarm and banana that await me. So what's the deal? I'm training for the Nike Women's Marathon and our coach has given us strict instructions to get some food into our bodies well before our our training runs in the morning. I'm not an early breakfast person as it is, especially not before 7:00, so this has been a challenge for me. The one thing I can seem to get down is half a banana. Thus: lots of bananas hanging around the house. And with our unusually hot weather over the past week, that means lots of overripe bananas. So every cook or baker knows: time to make banana bread. I recently finished Molly Wizenberg's beautiful memoir, A Homemade Life. In it, Wizenburg chronicles her move to Seattle, meeting her future husband through her blog Orangette, and the death of her father. It's truly a food memoir for my generation--I can't so much relate to getting a divorce and up and moving to Italy. But I can relate to small apartment kitchens, what it feels like to move to a new city without knowing anyone, and stark uncertainty about what the future holds. In addition to prose that will make you want to read very slowly with hopes the book will never end, Molly includes numerous personal and family recipes she's come to cherish over the years. Her Banana Bread with Chocolate Chips and Ginger caught my eye.