When life hands you rotten bananas...

                                       ...make Banana Bread!

Because I can't bare to part with anything, (even rotten fruit) when my bananas go bad, I make banana bread with them. I love this recipe because it takes less than 10 minutes to throw everything together and you don't need a mixer...I'm not so good with machines. It's moist and delicious all on it's own. Great for breakfast or a snack. 

Here's what you need:

Rotten bananas (You don't want them totally decaying with flies buzzing around them, but you want them super soft with lots of brown spots. 3 or 4 will do, you'll need at least 3 decent sized bananas. I generally just use as many as I have. I used all of the cute little bananas shown in the picture for one loaf and the 3 larger ones for another loaf.)

1/3 cup of melted butter (Which is a little over 5 tablespoons.)

1 cup of sugar (You can easily reduce this to 3/4 cup or even half a cup if you're looking to cut back on sugar.)

1 egg

A splash of milk

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 teaspoon baking soda

A pinch of salt

1 teaspoon cinnamon

A pinch of nutmeg

1 1/2 cups of flour

Here's what you do: 

1) First, preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Peel rotten bananas and place them in a large mixing bowl.

Then use an old-fashioned potato masher to mash the bananas up until they look something like this:

2) Add 1/3 cup of melted butter to mashed bananas. Gram says you should only melt butter in the microwave 10 seconds at a time or it loses it's flavor. Gram is never wrong. So if you're nuking your butter to melt it, make sure you do it in 10 second intervals until it's melted. In a separate bowl, beat an egg with a splash of milk. Pour egg into mashed bananas as well as sugar and vanilla.

3) Mix it all up. Then sprinkle the baking soda and salt over the mix and mix in. Next add cinnamon and nutmeg and mix.

4) Last but not least, add the flour.

Mix the flour in. If you've ever made bread before, this dough won't be sticky like other dough, it'll still be fairly slimy and will look something like this:

5) This recipe makes enough for one loaf of bread. My bread pan is 4" x 8". You could use the same amount of mix for a larger pan or use smaller pans and make several little loaves. Butter your bread pan and pour mix into it.

6) Bake at 350 for one hour. I'd suggest pulling it out and popping a tooth pick in it after 45 minutes just in case, as oven times and temperatures vary. Cool on a rack.

Remove from pan, slice and serve. Sooooo good. My kids tear it up every time I make it.