Banana Bread

Tonight I had two things on the agenda -- make soup for dinner, and make banana bread.  The soup was a nice smattering of ingredients - I started with frying some bacon, removing the bacon and sauteing shallots, garlic, celery, carrot, mushrooms and potatoes (in the bacon grease, of course) - then throwing in some chicken broth, the crumbled bacon, and bits of cooked rabbit. Finished it off with a couple sprigs of rosemary and let it simmer while I worked on....


Whole-Wheat Banana Nut Bread (From Williams-Sonoma's baking cookbook)
This recipe makes two loaves.
2 1/2 cups whole-wheat flour, plus extra for dusting
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature, plus extra for greasing
2 cups sugar
2 cups mashed ripe banana (4 large bananas)
4 eggs
1 cup chopped walnuts or pecans


Preheat the oven to 350. Grease two 8 1/2 by 4 1/2 loaf pans and dust with flour.


In a bowl, stir together the flour, baking soda, and salt. Set aside. In another bowl, beat together the butter and sugar until blended; a hand-held mixer is useful for this step. Beat in the banana, then beat in the eggs until completely mixes; don't worry if the mixture looks lumpy and curdled. Stir in the nuts. Add the combined dry ingredients and stir just until blended (At this point, it is totally fine to taste the batter. multiple times).


Pour and scrape the batter into the 2 prepared pans and spread evenly. Bake until a thin wooden skewer (otherwise known as a toothpick) inserted into the center of the loaves come out clean, about 1 hour. Allow to cool in the pans for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely (or if you're me, leave them in the pans for an hour because you decided this step was not worth 
getting up off the couch for).
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The soup was pretty tasty. The banana bread - downright delicious. Alex and I each enjoyed a piece fresh from the oven, topped with a bit of butter and accompanied by a glass of cold milk. That's right - downright. delicious.