No-Sugar-Added Banana Bread
Welcome to 2012!
As I’ve been talking about for the last few months, one of my goals this year is to create a yearlong guide to natural health and beauty by posting one tip each week. These will include recipes for homemade beauty items plus tips on nutrition, exercise, and stress relief. I wanted to make sure the tips included in this project are:
- Simple: All tips, especially those requiring steps, should be straightforward, clear, and easy enough for my 10-year-old niece to follow.
- Frugal: Many of the beauty ideas require only ingredients that you very likely already have in your kitchen or pantry! If you need to buy new ingredients, they are probably things you would buy anyway (salt, sugar, oils). Containers can be anything you might normally recycle: used yogurt tubs or jam jars and empty travel-size shampoos work great.
- All-natural: I know that’s a vague term these days and I’m not going to get into details here about the FDA and cosmetics un/regulation in the US. Suffice it to say, for this blog, “all-natural” means the following: for beauty tips, if I can’t eat it, it doesn’t go on my skin; for health tips, the go-to methods are food, exercise, rest, and spirituality, not pharmaceuticals.
I’ll be posting the first tip tomorrow ~ and one per week after that ~ so stay tuned!
In the meantime, here’s a delicious recipe for no-sugar-added banana bread (sans nuts) that I just made this morning. It’s a very basic recipe that could be jazzed up with nuts or extra spices if you wanted. I felt like keeping it simple, and this was the result.
What a great way to start the year right. Enjoy!
No-Sugar-Added Banana Bread
No-Sugar-Added Banana Bread
Ingredients
- 3 ripe bananas, mashed
- 1/3 cup vegetable oil of your choice (or use applesauce if you have it! I didn’t have any, so used oil instead)
- 2 eggs or egg replacer
- 1/2 cup water
- 1 tsp. vanilla extract
- 2 cups whole wheat flour (or gluten-free flour of your choice)
- 1 tsp. baking soda
- 2 tsp. baking powder
- 1/2 tsp. cinnamon
- 1/2 tsp. pumpkin pie spice
Steps
- Preheat oven to 325F.
- Mash the bananas until they are mostly lump-free.
- With a hand mixer, beat together the banana, oil, eggs, vanilla, and water until creamy.
- In a separate bowl, sift the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and spices.
- Gradually add the dry mixture to the wet one, beating well.
- Pour the batter into a gently oiled and floured 9×5 inch loaf pan and spread evenly.
- Bake for 45 minutes or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.
- Cool completely on wire rack before slicing.
Enjoy!
