10 Minute Banana Bread.

(image source)

Apparently my mother-in-law makes really delicious banana bread. Or so my husband says. Though I've never experienced it, the raves from the hubs are rather convincing. This doesn't surprise me. She's a fantastic cook and always outdoes herself at family gatherings, making way too much food for the head count and forcing us all to eat it. Maybe FORCE is too strong a word . . .

Anyway, I've never in any way felt one bit of pressure to feed my hubby well and make his belly happy. No, not an ounce of pressure to be held to such high standards of cooking and baking that he was privy to as a child. [oh I forgot - "insert sarcasm font"]

Well, a few months ago we had a few rotten bananas that I forgot about let go bad on purpose. I once heard that these disgusting, black, compost-worthy things were good for one thing and one thing only. Yes, one look at the bananas and Mike was demanding I make

Banana Bread.
(a food I've never made from scratch in my life)

He also threw in a little elbow jab of "My mom makes the best banana bread." So, instead of taking the easy way out and calling my fantastically ingredient-savvy mother-in-law for her legendary banana bread recipe, my pride called rank and shouted "I will create my OWN banana bread recipe and Mike will love it and I will pass it onto my children and their children and it will be famous!!" and then I laughed uncontrollably like Dr. Evil and Evil Ursula's love child.

Don't let me fool you, of course I resorted to searching Google. Shameful. I literally typed in "easy banana bread recipe" and clicked on the one that said "10 minute banana bread." I figured, yea I've got 10 minutes to spare while looking in the mirror and calling myself a lazy piece of . . . " 

LONG STORY SHORT - I made the bread according to the recipe I found that day (The Fresh Loaf originally from The Joy of Cooking) with only one exception: I did swap whole wheat flour in for the white flour that it calls for. We loved it! Though, I don't recommend using cinnamon, especially if you have a husband who hates cinnamon. Just sayin'....

Also, be warned, it's called "10 minute banana bread" but that's the prep time. The bake time is more like 50 minutes. Sneaky.

It's very yummy and a little bit of me is super proud that I can follow simple instructions bake banana bread my husband loves to eat. I've made it a few times since the first time, sans the cinnamon of course, and I get that warm fuzzy proud feeling every time he inhales a slice in 2 seconds.

I made a double batch of this on Sunday, because we had SIX rotten bananas that I forgot about again let go bad on purpose. I didn't take progress pictures. However, if this tells you anything . . . after 3 minutes of it being out of the oven, this is what it looked like:

I even brought some to work yesterday. Besides the coworker that claims to hate bananas (GASP!), the bread was well received by the tummies who got some of it.

The Mike-Meter is at an 8.73 (he's been watching too much Olympic gymnastics). This time around he says it was a little too moist. I blame this on wanting to eat it too much and taking it out of the oven too soon. Overall, on a good day, I'd say he'd give it a 10.

Here is the official recipe from The Fresh Loaf:

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After plugging all ingredients in (no cinnamon, whole wheat flour) I discovered it is 225 calories for a slice that is 1/8 of the loaf. That's a pretty big slice, but I'm betting if you love this recipe as much as we do, you'll be eating more than that.

Go ahead, try it tonight!

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