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Leftover Love: Bananas
Filed under simple livingMar 7
Banana! by aphasiafilms on Flickr
We are bananas for bananas in my house. We buy them every week. I take one to work with me every day for my lunch. They are delicious and nutritious. Yep, we love our bananas.
However, no matter how many bananas we get through in a week, we often seem to end up with one or two dreaded brown bananas. YUK. No longer delicious and probably not that nutritious either after a week in the fruit bowl. I have been very guiltily adding these to our compost heap. I hate throwing away any kind of food, but throwing away food that has probably been flown in from far far away is just … ridiculous.
Happily I have now discovered 2 solutions to this problem: banana smoothies, and banana bread.
Banana smoothies
Banana Smoothie Before Blending by mudge on Flickr
Smoothies are so easy to make, especially if you have a blender. Just chuck a couple of bananas in, plus some milk, or apple juice, or yogurt, whizz for a couple of minutes, and bingo! For extra sweetness, add some honey. For a milkshake type smoothie you can even add ice cream. You can also add any other soft fruits you like, such as strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, mango etc, which will give you a nice variety of flavours. We usually keep a bag of these in the freezer for just this purpose - you don’t even need to defrost them as the blender will chop them up, and they act like teeny tiny ice cubes.
If you don’t have a blender, don’t worry, you can still have homemade smoothies. Just mash the bananas (and any other fruit you want to use) and then push the mush through a sieve. Add milk/yogurt/fruit juice and whisk/stir enthusiastically.
Banana Bread by seriouslygood1 on Flickr
Banana Bread
Banana bread isn’t really bread at all in my book, it’s definitely cake. I made my first banana bread yesterday, using this recipe, which contains walnuts as well. It is yummy, and nice and moist in the middle. I used a food processor which made it super-duper quick and easy but you can do it by hand. You will just need to use a bit of elbow grease to cream the butter and sugar together, just remember to take the butter out of the fridge to soften. I think this is the first time I’ve ever baked something for myself as an adult and I found it very theraputic. The best bit – licking the bowl clean of course!!!
For banana bread you will need about 3 medium sized bananas. However, you can freeze leftover bananas until you have enough to make a batch. You can freeze them whole, either peeled or unpeeled, or you can chop them up and put them into a freezer-safe container. NB Frozen bananas will be softer and mushier when thawed so they are best for using in recipes rather than eating whole.
Finally, thanks to the wonder of Twitter, I have discovered a website dedicated entirely to banana bread recipes. There are tons of variations on the basic recipe, so there is no excuse for getting bored! I just need to work out what a cup of something equates to in grams. This is a bit of a puzzle as surely it depends what size of cup you use. Can any Americans out there enlighten me?
I’m sure there are many other ingenious ways of using up leftover bananas, so leave a comment and let’s hear them!
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3 Responses to “Leftover Love: Bananas”
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Nice ideas. One minor quibble: I thought bananas made the journey here slowly — in a banana boat, ripening as they travel, not using much fuel. Don’t they? I hope it’s true, because I try to avoid flown-in food, and I love bananas.
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rekindled said on April 11th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
Thank you, Sarah, for pointing this out! I just assumed that because bananas come from so far away that they must be flown in, but in fact you are correct. They are transported in refrigerated ships. So bananas are not quite as bad as I thought, in terms of fuel consumption/carbon emissions. Hurrah!
However, my point still remains that it is silly to transport something over such a long distance only to throw it away.
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Stu said on June 16th, 2009 at 11:41 am
May I suggest a fond favourite in our house for a saturday evening? We call them Banana Russians…effectively it’s a banana twist on the “White Russian” cocktail. I don’t know if you like a tipple, but if you do this is particularly lovely…
In a blender add 2 parts kahlua to 1 part vodka, 5/6 parts milk and a banana. Add some ice cubes and then gently blend with a couple of blasts (enough to break up the cubes and mush the banana)
Enjoy!
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