Tonight I came home from my Tuesday two-a-day and headed directly for the kitchen to make my lunch for tomorrow. Even though what I really wanted to do was face plant in my bed. As I reached for my bananas in the fruit basket, I realized that all three of my bananas were pretty much bad. Brown. Mushy. And was that really just a fruit fly swarming over them?
Damnit.
If you know me, you know how much I hate, hate, HATE – wasting food. Throwing away food, especially produce, grinds my gears. SO MUCH.
So I sucked it up and went on a mission to salvage my three bananas.
I dug through the cabinets and realized (phew!) that I had enough ingredients to make banana bread. Special thanks / blog shout out to my roomie Slesh who kindly let me borrow 2 cups of wheat flour and 1/3 cup of her yogurt. I owe you!
Question for my followers (leave a comment) – how do you typically salvage produce or other food that you know will go bad?!
Here’s the recipe!
Ingredients
- 2 cups all-purpose flour (I substituted wheat flour)
- 3/4 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1 cup sugar
- 1/4 cup butter, softened
- 2 large eggs
- 1.5 cups mashed ripe bananas, about 3 (PERFECT!)
- 1/3 cup plain low-fat yogurt
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- Cooking spray
Directions
- Preheat oven to 350.
- Lightly spoon flour into dry measuring cups; level with a knife. Combine the flour, baking soda, and salt. Stir with a whisk.
- Place sugar and butter in large bowl, and beat with a mixer at medium speed until well blended.
- Add the eggs, 1 at a time, beating well after each addition.
- Add banana, yogurt, and vanilla; beat until blended.
- Add flour mixture; beat at low speed just until moist.
- Spoon batter into an 8.5 x 4.5 inch loaf pan coated with cooking spray. Bake at 350 for 1 hour or until a wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean.
- Cool 10 minutes in pan on a wire rack; remove from pan. Cool completely.
Bananas saved.
Mission accomplished.
Now I can faceplant – after finishing my late night snack of course. 🙂
Goodnight!
A little tip that I picked up while I was a banquet chef at the Norton Country Club for 4 years was that if there was any vegetables or anything like that going bad, you can pretty much throw anything and everything but the kitchen sink, into a pasta salad! Depending on what things you have you can theme your pasta salad to cater the produce you have. For instance, celery, peppers, olives, tomatoes.. if stuff like that was going bad, it may be a good idea to add all of those to some cooked and chilled pasta (any kind you’d like) with some greek dressing and some feta cheese, yup, feta cheese! into it and create a great greek-style pasta salad.
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