"BananaBread" news and stories

Bananas the other side of ripe often end up in a tidy loaf spiked with walnuts. Instead of the same old, same old, take a tip from Victoria, Australia, restaurant Apte, and add coconut to the standard recipe, then give the banana bread a Middle Eastern touch with a topping of honey labneh, pistachios and seasonal fruit. (A half-cup of shredded coconut should be plenty for a standard banana bread recipe.)

Toasting the walnuts also adds depth of flavor to banana bread, as in this recipe from Curtis Stone. Or try this chocolate-infused two-tone banana bread recipe.

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I have a foodie confession: While I do like fruit, I almost never eat it in its full form. I try -- really I do. I buy fruit and eat some nibbles, but before I get to the rest, it inevitably goes bad and I have to either have to throw it into a smoothie pronto, or freeze it for a smoothie later. But that's not the case with my beloved banana.

Banana is the wonderful fruit that's good even when it's bad. The blacker and more shriveled that the skin is, the better it is for baking up a batch of banana bread. I picked some up a few weeks ago, with the best of intentions, but they went black before I could eat them. But they're bananas! So, no matter how hot my apartment was, I knew what I had to do.

As if that wasn't good enough -- recipes that allow you to make the most of fruit going bad -- banana bread is one of the easiest and most forgiving foods to bake. The above was whipped up half-assed. I doubled my recipe. I didn't level off my measurements. I smushed and mixed it all together in the end with a potato masher. But still, the end result was a nice warm cakey bread with a little bit of melting butter.

This weekend I was watching the bonus features for the DVD of Cursed (I know, I know) and they had a little goofy skit where the crew was making banana bread. Then they sliced the bananas. Sliced? Funny how I can be fooled by gallons of fake blood in a movie but show sliced instead of mashed bananas in the bonus documentary and my logic detector immediately goes off. This sent me off on a search to see if perhaps I was just wrong, maybe some people slice their bananas. I determined that if they do they are in deep cover on the web, it was all mashing everywhere, sometimes in a mixer or sometimes the standard fork method I use. But it got me thinking about our ingrained culinary habits. I tend to cook without recipes and by habit with old favorites and banana bread is definitely one of them. Maybe it was time for a change. I went over to epicurious and took a look at their recipes picking and choosing the elements I liked (I'm not so much of a recipe girl).  I decided to go mix things up a bit, replacing sugar with brown sugar and using butter instead of oil. I also added a bit of lemon juice and some buttermilk. It was delicious banana bread but it wasn't my banana bread, it was too good. It's just a bit annoying that I've been using an inferior recipes all these years.  It makes me wonder what over recipes I could be sprucing up. My challenge to the slashfoodies out there is to take one of your default recipes throw a few tweaks in it and let me know your experiences.

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