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Over the weekend, we did a bit of baking together, my boys and I.

My youngest was helping me bake cookies when my eldest said he was going to write a recipe for “friends pie.”  He grabbed a piece of paper and a pen and began to write.  As he was writing, he told us about a book called Enemy Pie that his teacher read out-loud in class on Friday.

He said he was going to use two of his favorite ingredients in his recipe – bananas and oreos.

Hmmm – “What else?” I asked.

“You’ll see,” he replied.  He began peeling and mashing the bananas and then crushing the oreos.  I busied myself with the cookie-baking since I was sorely tempted to interfere!

Not long after he stood staring at the two bowls full of mashed bananas and crushed oreos, he asked me what he should do next.

“What does your recipe say?” I asked.

“Put everything in the oven and wait for 20 minutes,” he said.

I suggested friends “bread” as we had no pie shells and I wasn’t quite ready to make pie crusts at that moment, or to hand that task over to my 8 year old (yes, I was interfering at this point, but he did ask me, right?!).  My eldest said o.k.  I gave him the banana bread recipe and he followed that, making a few changes to both my recipe and his as he went along.

Baking for 20 minutes was a bit of a problem.  The baker finally acquiesced to the “pie” staying in the oven a little longer.

Many bread recipes (not his!) call for a long cooling period, sometimes even overnight.  That never seems to happen in my household!

The friends “pie” smelled good.

It looked good too.

It tasted marvelous – yum!  Why haven’t I ever thought of adding oreos to banana bread??

We thoroughly enjoyed the results of his “friends pie” recipe and had some great discussion about friends and “enemies.”