Inspired by one of my favorite blogs, poppytalk, I decided to make a snippet blog summarizing items I’ve used or come across within the past week that caught my eye or invoked a memory – especially things I know I won’t get around to doing a full blog about. Maybe it’s something I’ll do once a week. A summary of my favorite parts of the week? I’m really not sure at this point. Maybe it’ll just be an excuse to mash a load of some of my favorite pics together.
This week, 3/5 of my picks are food related. It doesn’t help to blog when you’re hungry. Oh god I want pasta and shrimp now. Thanks, poppytalk.
1. Home made banana bread made by yours truly this morning. I use a really flexible recipe that is full of win. If you’d like to try it out, see the end of this post for my {ahem – my moms} basic recipe.
2. Spicy Seafood Udon, from Yo! Sushi. I can’t get enough of this dish at the moment.
3. Jamie Oliver pasta machine. I love it and I try to use it at least once a week. Perfect for lasagna and linguine.
4. Kitchen sink drama, September/October issue of House and Home. Love that sink. Plus hydrangeas …
5. Dark Horse cowl by Fringe. I really like the selection of cowls and shawls by Fringe. At the moment I’m knitting myself a cowl for my trip to London next week. It’s brown. Additional note: here it is completed!
Ingredients
Ingredients
4-5 bananas, mashed
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup oil
1 egg
1 1/2 cups of all purpose flour
Raisins, walnuts and poppy seeds to your liking
Method
I typically just throw everything into a bowl and stir. The order will not affect it at all. It’s not fussy and turns out great every time. It’s very easy to substitute the ingredients as well {details below}. As long as your mixture is the same consistency as porridge, you can add and subtract whatever you like. Bake for 45 minutes in a bread tin at 180 degrees celcius.
Substitutions
You really can use whatever you like in banana bread. Yogurt – with or without fruit, walnuts, pecans, blueberries, raisins, honey, poppy seeds, and even mayonnaise. Hold on – yes, it sounds gross, but essentially you’re just adding oil and egg, which are two ingredients.
Banana tip
Instead of mashing new bananas, what I do is; once a banana has gone too bruised {to the point that I don’t want to eat the brown gooey bits}, I toss it in the freezer. The bananas will go black once frozen – but don’t worry. That’s perfect. I usually make banana bread once I have about 4 or 5 in my freezer and they’re taking up too much room. Defrost them for a couple of hours {I just leave them in the sink since they will leak}, and then unpeel them into a bowl. They’ll look really disgusting and resemble large dead slugs more than bananas, but they’re perfect in this form. Don’t be put off by their state, as they make scrumptious banana bread.
Click here for a handy cooking calculator, should you prefer to measure in cups, mls, oz etc.