Banana Nut Bread

A month or two ago, we had an annoying fruit fly infestation that forced me to immediately freeze our bananas since we couldn't really keep them on the counter and no one was eating them after a day or so. Thomas has been intent on me trying out either Banana Nut Bread or Banana Pudding, so today, when I had a minute (knowing I needed a recipe for this post), I hit google and went with my first find (surprisingly, I didn't have to go searching all over kingdom come for a recipe that had just the ingredients I had at hand).

Property of SimplyRecipes.com

• Prep time: 5 minutes
• Cook time: 1 hour

INGREDIENTS

• 3 or 4 ripe bananas, smashed
• 1/3 cup melted butter
• 1 cup sugar (can easily reduce to 3/4 cup)
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• Pinch of salt
• 1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour

METHOD

No need for a mixer for this recipe. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C). With a wooden spoon, mix butter into the mashed bananas in a large mixing bowl. Mix in the sugar, egg, and vanilla. Sprinkle the baking soda and salt over the mixture and mix in. Add the flour last, mix. Pour mixture into a buttered 4x8 inch loaf pan. Bake for 1 hour. Cool on a rack. Remove from pan and slice to serve.

Yield: Makes one loaf.

After reading through the comments, I thawed out my bananas (I went with four) and set to work. I went ahead and just used my masher to not only mash the bananas, but mix the entire thing, step by step, as well. Everything went perfectly and I even added in some steel cut oats (I was running low on rolled oats and didn't have any nuts) and some nutmeg for a little something extra. The only issue I had, honestly, was that I didn't have an appropriate bread pan, so I just went ahead and made them into muffins, following a commenter's lead (it made 11 for both of us and took 35 minutes instead of an hour for them to be nice, brown, and ready to eat).

I've been really wanting to find more healthy alternatives to all of the junk we eat as a family, so hopefully this is another step into the right direction.