What to do with over-ripe bananas?

I've been home for three days now. Yesterday I went shopping for some food.  Unlike me, when my husband is alone at home he shops on a daily basis, buying only small amounts to last for a few days.  He doesn't have the same need as I do to stock the kitchen and the fridge for the possible oncoming apocalypse.  I need to fill the cupboards with enough food for a famine emergency.  I know this comes from growing up with my parents.  Their war experiences meant that we always had enough food in the house to feed a family of four for at least six months. Luckily sell by date stamping didn't exist when I was a child.

I bought lots of fruit since I love the look of abundance that a well-stocked fruit bowl has.  Of course, I hadn't checked to see what we already had and the bananas and apples I bought were not at all needed.  So, what to do with the old overripe bananas and apples?  I decided to bake a cake.  I checked out a recipe on the internet, checked that I had the required  ingredients and set to work.

Now, Ralph doesn't love banana breads or cakes and I'm supposed to be watching my weight - so who exactly is this cake for? Rather than throw away two rotten bananas and a few old apples, I have just used a load of flour, sugar, eggs, oil and nuts to make a cake that probably will go into the freezer and wait for future guests.  This is assuming that this new recipe comes out edible.

Why this pathological need to not throw things away? I phrase it like this because it it not really about 'keeping' things, but about not throwing perfectly good things out.   Food is especially hard.  I know, I know, my parents were in concentration camps, they were starving, they had to eat potato peelings, their siblings died of malnutrition.  All of this is true and is part of my history and upbringing.  But enough already!  Throw out the damn bananas, Cynthia.

Not being a Freudian, Jungian or Adlerian psychiatrist does not mean that even I can't see the ridiculous pattern here. I am a pretty stubborn woman (really!!!) and once committed to an action I really don't like to back out.  Even if it's going to cost more in ingredients than the price of old fruit, I will bake the cake.  Once I make an attempt to park my car, even if I've come into the space too sharply I will manoevre back and forth a dozen times, rather than pull out and try again. Once I start knitting something, I would rather fiddle around with wrong measurements than rip it apart and start again. This is a character flaw that does not serve me well.

The expression 'throwing the baby out with the bath water' means to get rid of the good .parts as well as the bad parts of something when trying to improve it.  I think I'm one of those people who attempts to keep both the baby and the bath water.  I sometimes think I would just dilute the bath water instead of throwing it all away.  You never can tell when some old bath water will come in handy.