Banana Bread

After spending an awesome afternoon at the Del Mar races with friends, we arrived home exhausted. You know, the kind of tired you feel after not doing anything except talking and eating for hours on end in the sun? A good, not very hard earned kind of exhausted.

Gabi and I decided it was the perfect time to EAT EVEN MORE and make some banana bread.

I've been promising her that we'd make banana bread for ages. We buy the bananas, wait for them to over-ripen, and then forget about them until they are a shriveled black gooey mess. So then we have to throw them away and buy more, and the process repeats itself.

Finally, we caught the bananas before they shriveled up! So into the kitchen we went and whipped up our quick treat.

We used a really great Banana Bread recipe from Laurel's Kitchen (one of my favorite cookbooks) that uses whole wheat flour and wheat germ. It's so easy to make, and tastes down home delicious.

Laurel's Kitchen Banana Bread

3 very ripe bananas (1 cup mashed)
juice of 1 lemon
1/3 cup oil or butter
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 cup wheat germ
(1 cup chopped dates)
(1 cup toasted nuts)

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F

Mash bananas and mix them with lemon juice until smooth. Cream butter or oil and sugar together and add the banana mix, stirring well.

Sift together flour, salt, baking powder and baking soda. Mix in wheat germ. Add to the banana mix and stir in the dates and nuts if desired.

Turn it into a 4"x8" loaf pan and baked for about 45 minutes. (You can also bake banana bread in an 8"x8" pan, or make 12 cupcakes. Bake these for about 1/2 hour.)

We skipped the dates and nuts and added chocolate chips. We didn't want our sweet treat to be TOO healthy.

When it was finally done, we slathered our piping hot chocolaty banana bread with butter (salted- I've decided that there is no point to buying unsalted butter ever again) and had the best dinner ever.

After losing 2 more pounds this last week, I hope this little indulgence doesn't do too much harm!