Healthier Banana Bread with Coconut Oil (no butter!)

We love banana bread around here. Bananas are cheap and delicious and banana bread is awesome for breakfast or snacking. We jumped on the coconut oil bandwagon a while ago and like to incorporate it into baked goods that will taste good with the fresh coconut flavor.

This loaf turned out great and we had no complaints! In fact..it's only been two days and it's gone but don't tell anybody.

Ingredients

3-4 very ripe bananas (I used 3)

1/3 cup coconut oil

3/4 cup sugar OR (1/4 cup sugar and 1/4 cup honey..which is what I used)

1 large egg 

1 tsp vanilla

1 3/4 cup white whole wheat flour 

1 1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp cinnamon

(Opt) chopped walnuts 

1) Heat oven to 350

2) Mix mashed bananas, oil, egg, vanilla, sugar, and walnuts

3) Mix dry ingredients in separate bowl

4) Slowly incorporate dry ingredients with banana mixture but do not over mix!

5) Bake 50-60 minutes in a loaf pan until fork comes out clean. Mine took about 55. 

Enjoy!!!

Soda Sugar

**Okay, so this is an old post that I wrote. But we'll work on loading this page up in order to categorize our blog better, and you'll hear from Chris shortly.

My hubby used to work as a health specialist at a hospital in the upstate, and obviously now he's an RN. He has a lot of life goals but one of them that I think pretty much ROCKS is that he wants to write a book about health. "A really good book with easy to read charts and pictures and stuff," he says.

A book of simple stuff that can get overlooked. Soda, for instance. We don't drink soda but maybe once every....6 months? Maybe. Probably not even that much. (I'd be a liar if I said I didn't crave a quality root beer every so often.) We stick to water, tea, and coffee, and we do occasionally drink beer and wine with dinner, or socially with friends..but even then, never more than 2.

I like this because soda and other such drinks make ya feel icky, and make your innerds icky too. But I get that they can be totally addicting.

So we decided to measure into a glass the amount of sugar in both a typical canned soda as well as a bottled soda...because not a lot comes to mind when I have to think in grams (the way sugar is listed on soda cans and bottles..I wonder if less people would drink soda if they reported in teaspoons or tablespoons of sugar.) Here they are:

Amount of sugar consumed when you drink a bottled soda (the kind out of the soda machines.)

And the amount consumed in a typical canned soda:

And excess sugar gets stored in the body as fat.

Nobody wants that. Everything in moderation..but maybe less of this.

Blueberry Barbecue Sauce

My friend mentioned making barbecue sauce with blueberries and I was immediately interested. I love weird food combinations. Maybe this isn't weird. I don't know. Regardless, it was too good not to share. Forgive me in advance for not being a precise ingredient-measuring person. I feel like that should be required when recipe-posting. I prefer to just try it until it tastes good. I think I inherited that from my Greek-no-measuring-cups-or-spoons-Dad. So here are the basic guidelines and ingredients I used to make this awesome-sauce. (Finally I can say awesomesauce and it's legit.)

Ingredients:

1-2 cups of blueberries

1 small yellow onion, chopped

1-2 garlic cloves, chopped (or 3 or 7 if you're me.)

1/4 cup vinegar (cider or balsamic)

1 tbsp. brown sugar

a dash of liquid smoke

1/4 cup ketchup

1 tbsp. molasses (totally optional)

*red pepper flakes

*chili powder

dash of S&P

*I didn't put amounts on these guys 'cause Tates are spice-a-holics. Start with just a little sprinkle if you're not as fond of the heat, and then add as you like. Heck, I don't even know if the other measurements are accurate, but they should be close.

Method:

1. We already had boiled down blueberries from when we made pancake syrup...so I just used those. If you only have fresh, boil them down until they are squishy and liquidy..mine still had whole blueberries in there (kinda like when you're making cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving.)

2. Puree the blueberries, onion, and garlic in processor or blender. Mine struggled a bit since it was so thick, so I went ahead and added a little bit of the vinegar to help it along..when you're done the mixture should look like it does in the picture above. 

3. Place in a sauce pan on low-med and begin adding the rest of the vinegar, the liquid smoke, brown sugar, ketchup, molasses, and spices. Let simmer so all the flavors can meld together. Since my blueberries were boiled down from the start, I didn't need to bring them to a boil again, but if you started with fresh berries and skipped the boil down part, you'll need to do that to get it saucy.

4. Taste it a bunch and add more spices to bring up the heat!

Some other recipes I saw called for other ingredients like zinfandel, cayenne, and worcestershire, so 

feel free to experiment!

We ate ours over pulled pork barbecue, but I've heard it's great on just about any meat, even fish!