Bountiful Baskets Organic Bananas Bread

It’s that time again, time to order Bountiful Baskets. I still haven’t used up most things from the last basket. I still have almost all of my plumbs from the plumby paradise pack. I plan on making:

Asian Plum Sauce

Plumb Tart

Plumb freezer jam (to use in jam thumbprints for Christmas cookies)

This week I’m going to make lettuce wraps and crab rangoons for dinner one night to serve with my homemade plumb sauce. Yum! That's about as far as I've gotten with meal planning so far. Check back tomorrow for the rest of the weeks meals plus ideas for the beautiful hatch chilies that the grocery stores are brimming with. Tonight I served an ultra intensive, gourmet meal...Tuna sandwiches on toasted buns.

For now, my organic bananas from the basket two weeks ago turned brown super fast, before we could eat them. (Which is a surprise considering how fast my monkeys go thru bananas!) So, I froze them for later.

Today I made ‘Bountiful Banana Bread.’

6-8 brown bananas (thawed if they were frozen)

2 cups flour

1 tsp baking soda

¼ tsp salt

2 tsp cinnamon

2 tsp vanilla

1 tsp nutmeg

½ cup butter

½ cup brown sugar

2 eggs

Topping:

1 cup oatmeal

2 tbsp flour

¼ cup butter (softened)

2 tbsp brown sugar

1 tbsp sugar

1 tsp cinnamon

Mix the bananas, vanilla, butter, sugar and eggs. Add in the flour, soda, salt, cinnamon and nutmeg.  Mix until just combined. Don’t over mix once you add the flour in otherwise the final product is tough not tender. Pour into greased loaf pan, muffin pan or mini loaf pans until ¾ full.

Mix (hand are best) the topping ingredients until combined. Sprinkle on top of the uncooked batter, pressing in only slightly to help it stick.

Bake in 350 degree oven.

Regular loaf pan – 45-50 min’s

Muffins – 25-30 min’s

Mini loaf pans 30-35 min’s

Till tooth pick inserted in the center* comes out clean.

*Last week was our best friends birthday. That particular day she happened to be working a double shift and her husband was in night school so we were babysitting her kids for the evening. Well, Brad was babysitting I was out for the night. Her oldest, my beautiful niece Alana, wanted to make a birthday cake for her mom to eat when she got home. Alana mixed up everything on her own and got it into the oven. The details from there are a bit sketchy. I’m not sure if a timer was set, for how long or if it was just ignored. Alana claims Brad said he checked the cake, Brad claims he told Alana to check it. Regardless, after blowing out the candles and cutting into the cake at 9 at night after a double shift, it was soup in the middle! Alana was so disappointed. It turned into a laughable forever memory as they picked out the cooked edges of the cake but I’m not sure Alana will bake a cake with Brad again.

What can I say, the man is married to Betty Crocker, he doesn’t have to be Betty. J