Banana Bread

 Finished Banana Bread

We have all bought food that we just haven't gotten around to eating. It goes bad, we feel guilty when we throw away the food, and we get frustrated when we waste money. Sometimes we are aware that there is food in our fridge that is going out of date, but it doesn't make for good leftovers. Luckily, bananas are not one of those types of foods. 

Originally found in East Asia, bananas are one of the most popular fruits today. (here). I mean, we all know the Chiquita Banana theme song, right? Even when bananas start to speckle, they are perfectly good to eat. When they start to become severely speckled, they are still capable of being used for baking.

I just so happened to have a few bananas laying around that were in the really speckly stage of life, and I didn't really want to eat them as is, so it was time to make banana bread. The recipe I used was originally for a banana-pecan bread, but I prefer walnuts to pecans.

Original Recipe from The New Good Housekeeping Cookbook 

1-3/4 cups all-purpose flower

2/3 cups sugar

1 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 cup butter/margarine

1 cup mashed banana (about 2 ripe large bananas)

1/2 cup pecans, coarsely chopped

1 teaspoon grated lemon peel

2 eggs, slightly beaten

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease 9" by 5" loaf pan.

2. In large bowl, mix first 5 ingredients. With pastry blender or 2 knives used scissors fashion, cut butter or margarine until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Stir in bananas, pecans, lemon peel, and eggs just until flavor is moistened. Spoon batter evenly into loaf pan.

3. Bake 55 minutes or until toothpick inserted into center of bread comes out clean. Cool bread in pan on wire rack 10 minutes; remove from pan and finish cooling on wire rack.

First, I used walnuts and craisins instead of pecans.I used 1/2 cup of walnuts and 1/2 cup of craisins. The walnuts were coarsely chopped, though. I used lemon juice because a lemon was not on hand.

 The bananas themselves were not ripe. I find the bread is much sweeter if the bananas are very freckled.

 After mixing the five dry ingredients together, I added the chopped butter, bananas, walnuts, craisins, lemon juice, and eggs. I didn't beat the eggs beforehand.

 When baking anything, its a good idea to get an idea of how easy it will be to get what you are baking out of the pan. It is pretty easy to get the bread out of the pan, but as a precaution I used cooking spray to line the bread pan and sprinkled flour into it.

 After preheating the oven to 350 degrees F, I poured the batter into the pan and stuck it into the oven. The mixture is not going to be watery like a cake batter.

  I really like this kind of bread. It is sweet and I think the walnuts go well with the banana flavor. It is very moist on the inside. I baked this for a total of 55 minutes, and it came out perfectly.

Finished product!