From Our Kitchen: Banana Bread

I buy a lot of bananas. Sometimes they all get eaten (yay!). Sometimes I cut them up and freeze the ones that are starting to brown to later use in smoothies. And sometimes, like last week, they have not all been eaten and I have too many bananas already in the freezer, so I decide to make banana bread. I absolutely love banana bread, and so does the hubs, and it is so incredibly easy to make! This is a nice treat to have for a snack, post-dinner, or even breakfast!

What You'll Need:

• 3 - 5 bananas (I use 5, which seems to make the bread extremely moist, but 3 will work if that is all you happen to have on hand!)
• 1/3 cup butter, melted
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 1/2 cups flour
• Optional mix-ins: chocolate chips, walnut pieces, pecan pieces, 1/4 cup of peanut butter!

What You'll Do:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spray a 5 x 10 bread loaf pan with Pam.
2. Mash bananas (I used the paddle attachment on my Kitchenaid, but you could easily use a potato masher to do this).
3. Either by hand, or with your mixer, add melted butter to mashed bananas.
4. Add sugar, egg, and vanilla to mashed banana mixture and incorporate well.
5. Add baking soda, salt, and flour, and mix well. If you have any optional mix-ins you want to add, go ahead and mix these in now.
6. Pour mixture into bread pan.
7. Bake for 50 - 60 minutes, or until bread is golden brown and center is set.
8. Remove from oven, cool on wire rack, and slice to serve.
9. Enjoy!

Note: You can also sub the bananas for another fruit, like strawberries! I honestly couldn't tell you which I like better, they are both so good! If you use strawberries, I used almost a whole container of fresh strawberries (I had probably eaten like 4 of them beforehand). I did everything the same, except that I mashed the strawberries up by hand before putting everything in my Kitchenaid (strawberries don't really mash like bananas with the paddle attachment :)

Left: Strawberry Bread
Right: Banana Bread with Peanut Butter!