The temptuous wyles of a pile of rotting bananas...

Unlike in Indiana, here in Colorado a couple bunches of bananas can sit for weeks on your counter top without any fruit fly invasions! If you ever even dared think about ripe fruit sitting on the counter in Indiana, fruit flies and their 50 closest buddies and all their larvae would immediately set up little camps in your kitchen. No matter how "ripe" (read: rotten) fruit sitting on the counter gets here in Colorado, we have yet to see a fruit fly!! It's lovely!! Especially since the kids go on and off bananas on the turn of a dime. One minute, we can't seem to come close to keeping enough bananas in the house for kids to snack on and people are complaining about how we are depriving them of the sacred banana; the next we have 8 whole bananas just sitting there...aging...browning....getting softer and softer and softer until the only thing left to do, oh darn!, is make banana bread!!

Today's banana bread was yummy! I didn't have any eggs, but, what luck!...a quick search on the Internet revealed that a good substitute in baking for eggs was...bananas!! I had plenty of those! I tripled the recipe (which makes one loaf) and did a different variation with each batch. Batch one was the straight up, normal banana bread...with my usual modifications of less sugar, less fat, applesauce in place of some of the sugar and fat, whole wheat flour instead of white, and generous amounts of cinnamon, ground cloves and ginger. With the second loaf, I replaced some of the wheat flour with quick oats. The third batch (the parental loaf) was the yummiest!! I replaced half the wheat flour with old fashioned oats and then added some extra quick oats. I added walnuts and raisins, as well....super duper yummy!! Once the looooooong wait was over and the loaves were finally baked, the kids had already come in to the kitchen several times following the scent of the baking bread as if it were a tangible thing like Pepe Le' Pu' green scent trail. They gobbled up half a loaf in no time...the "normal" loaf first, of course. Elijah came back for more and the quick oats loaf was the only one cut. He eyed it suspiciously, picked a piece up and, with one eye brow raised in suspicion, asked "does this have raisins in it?" No, Elijah, the dreaded raisins are only in the yummy, parental loaf. The child who had swallowed a live worm whole was greatly relieved that his sacred piece of banana bread did not contain the dread raisin.

So the kids all got some good, wholesome whole grains and banana and I got rid of a pile of rotting bananas...not bad for a lazy, Friday afternoon! :)

As an ending note, through writing this post and using spell check, I just learned that Internet is a proper noun and therefore should always be capitalized! Ya learn something new every day....