Adventures in Peggy's kitchen: banana bread

Not long ago, a friend told me she googled my blog. I wonder if a virtual cloud of dust rose up as I have not been very attentive to this site lately. Mostly because I can't decide what to do with it. So while I noodle the future of pp.com, here's a little foodie story:

My mom taught me to toss too-ripe bananas into the freezer when they languish and multiply until I guilt myself into baking banana bread. Saturday, I found seven brown frozen bananas and instructions that sounded delicious on FoodNetwork.com. 

I doubled this Paula Deen recipe so we would have two loaves when I finished...one for the freezer!

I pride myself on getting all my ingredients together before I start a cooking or baking project, prepping little dishes of wet and dry so I can whiz through the steps. The clean-up drives my husband crazy because he can't figure out why I need to measure.

And I always enjoy tweaking the instructions just a little...so I replaced one cup of sugar with stevia (the baking kind) and I used 2 1/2 cups of wheat flour and 1 1/2 cups of unbleached white flour. There was only a little blood from my knuckle suffered while zesting the orange so I left that in. My seven bananas were just a little shy of three cups so I chopped the orange pulp into little bits and added that to the mashed, thawing banana glop.

I even lined the bottom of my loaf pans with parchment paper! I was pleased when I put them in the oven and stayed so until I was cleaning up and noticed the carefully measured Greek yogurt still sitting on the counter. That was my replacement for the sour cream.

Argh! In a panic, I pulled the warm-but-not-set batter from the oven, dumped it from the carefully prepared pans, scraped the excess from the parchment paper and added the Greek yogurt. 

And then I poured myself a healthy glass of water since it was not yet noon, dammit.

The two loaves baked for a little more than an hour and did the condo ever smell good!

The next time, I'll be braver about the bits of orange and add more of that. And less blood!