If you’re like me and have been panic buying bananas, you’ve definitely tried turning the overripe ones into banana bread. I’ve done three of them. You might have a favorite recipe in a book or have gone to Google or YouTube to search one out. I tested three of our web resources.
AtoZ World Foodis perfect for researching world cultures, world food, finding great pictures, with a catalog of thousands of recipes. A search for banana bread results in 10 different banana breads from various “Banana Lands,” for example, Bermuda, Brazil, Angola, or Zimbabwe. One I think I’d like to try is the Banana Mango Bread from the Dominican Republic. I’m not going to repeat the recipe here but have linked to it in the previous sentence, but just as soon as my banana pile turns black, this is what I’m doing.
For current recipes, I looked in PressReader, a great source for streaming current magazines and newspapers from around the world. It is easy to search but the results change day-to-day since they do not keep more than three or four back issues. A search will look through all 7,000 different publications and give results from only the last three days. Right now, I find banana bread with lots of variations, including blueberries, chocolate, oats, and sometimes measured out in grams and baked in Celsius. This source is excellent for many reasons. I feel up-to-date on how the Coronavirus Quarantine prompted an explosion in home baking and have found a wide variety of recipes.
The other web resource I searched is Global Newsstream. This is not a streaming source but a straight up database of newspaper articles from thousands of papers dating back to the 1980’s (generally). I did a search for the phrase (in quotation marks) “banana bread recipe”. There were 618 results arranged from most recent to the oldest, a 1985 article called 1955 Banana Bread Recipe has Become a Kitchen Classic published in the Toronto Star. This recipe contains shortening so I won’t be trying it, ever. I had to click through four or five more articles until I got one that did much more than mention banana bread. Global Newsstream is good for many different areas of research but was not the immediate reward I thought it would be.
The Library is a longtime subscriber the magazine streaming resource RBdigital. Just recently we’ve upped the game. From only 55 different magazine titles, we now have thousands. I was up to page 7 on the results list when I gave up counting. Some that I’ve been enjoying the past week include Archaeology, Cook’s Illustrated, Bon Appetit, GQ France, Architectural Digest India, and National Geographic Mexico. If you have a printer and crayons, you can print pages from the coloring books for adults! Yes, there is an app.
Our other magazine streaming site is PressReader. It has some of the same magazines but thousands of others as well as newspapers including Chicago Sun Times and the Chicago Tribune. It also has a great app.
Almost every day new books arrive at the Library to be processed and then placed on the shelf or in your hands. Take a look at some of the books that have arrived most recently at the Library. Ask for more titles at the Research Services Desk!
Almost every day new books arrive at the Library to be processed and then placed on the shelf or in your hands. Take a look at some of the books that have arrived most recently at the Library. Ask for more titles at the Research Services Desk!
Almost every day new books arrive at the Library to be processed and then placed on the shelf or in your hands. Take a look at some of the books that have arrived most recently at the Library. Ask for more titles at the Research Services Desk!
The Library is a longtime subscriber the magazine streaming resource 
