Banana Loaf or Muffins - low fat, no added sugar

My goodness, it's September already! Our last three weeks of summer will probably be nicer than the first three months...and it's cool enough overnight and in the mornings to make me want to turn the furnace on early.

Now to the point: I've modified this recipe considerably, mainly by: deleting the sugar; if I'm a bit short of mashed banana I've added an extra egg; I mix different flours (yesterday I used 2/3 whole-wheat all-purpose flour and 1/3 teff flour). It doubles well and freezes well, if you've got a particularly big bunch of over-ripe bananas. And of course you can add up to 3/4 of a cup of brown sugar if you really need to.

Banana-Fruit Loaf or Muffins, adapted from “Banana Walnut Loaf” recipe, The Chatelaine Cookbook, © 1973

Preheat oven to 350F. Grease or spray baking dishes (muffin pans or loaf pans). Prepare a cup of fresh or frozen and thawed berries (yesterday I used thawed cranberries and blueberries), or chopped walnuts.

Dry ingredients:

In a large bowl, stir together:

• 2 cups flour
• 1 tbsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 to 3/4 cup brown sugar (optional)

Stir dry ingredients and nuts/fruit(s) together.

Wet ingredients:

In a medium bowl, mix well:

• 1.5 cups mashed banana
• 1/4 vegetable oil (I used sunflower oil)
• 1/4 cup soured milk (to sour fresh milk, add a few drops of vinegar or lemon juice and stir)
• 2 large eggs, beaten
• 1 tsp vanilla

Make a well in dry ingredients and stir wet ingredients in lightly. Stir only enough to moisten dry ingredients.

Fill prepared pan(s) and smoosh batter to edges. Don't over-fill!

Makes enough for 1 9x6x3 inch loaf (bake for 1 hour at 350F) or 12 muffins (bake at 350F for 25 minutes) or until toothpick inserted in loaf/muffin comes out clean.

Allow to cool for 10 or 15 minutes before removing to cool completely on wire racks (or slather with butter and eat warm!). BTW, waiting to remove the loaf or muffins keeps them together -- if you try to remove them when they're hot they'll fall to pieces.

My birthday (sigh) again and pies

Today is my fiftieth (mumble-mumble-mumble) birthday (I think last year's was my mumble-mumble birthday: http://diabetes-cats.blogspot.com/2008/08/my-birthday-sigh.html). My horoscopes are all in conflict today -- what are they thinking?!

My sweet Mom called me this morning and sang Happy Birthday to me. Her soprano is nowhere near what it was now that she's 77, but it was also early in the morning so she wasn't warmed up. She was going to the church to make pies today. She's in charge of trimming crusts, and she's not that keen on it. (She also sent me a cheque with my birthday card -- my bank holds any cheques from non-Ontario sources for six days, though, so it won't burn a hole in my pocket.)


I often watched her whip up a basic pie pastry in a couple of minutes. Her piecrusts were always light and flaky, and didn't, like mine, end up mounded high over the soggy fruit. She also didn't like the way I peeled apples for her, using a sharp potato peeler instead of a paring knife. I figured you'd get more fruit using the parer carefully, but it was too slow for her and she'd take over. As a result (yeah, right, blame your mother again!) I can't make a nice short flaky pastry.


It's been a summer. I've been out of work for almost three months, and instead of using this time to relax and enjoy the summer, work on my garden, clean and organize the house, keep in touch with friends, get in shape, etc., I've mostly been lazing around and feeling sorry for myself. I tell myself it's due to my severe sleep deficit: I haven't slept for eight hours in a row for years. It's not something you get used to. It's almost like being a shift worker.


I have a couple of pounds of frozen already-mashed overripe bananas (to make banana-walnut-cranberry-blueberry muffins, using no sugar and all-purpose whole wheat flour), and a couple of pounds of frozen gooseberries -- one cup or so from last year's garden's meagre harvest and several pints of big red ones from the grocery -- to make jam (no pectin required with my old-fashioned recipe). So it's not like I don't have anything to do; it's just like I don't feel like doing any of it.

However, I did just de-clump and deodorize (with baking soda) the litter boxes, so I hope that my neighbour is happy.


And Mr. Jones ran right up to the front door to greet me today, chirping and yowling -- he REALLY wants to come in the house. Handsome Stranger, on the other hand, has draped himself across my shoulders and is snoozing...

Benign Neglect

The last time I made banana muffins I neglected to clean the muffin pans out (nice vintage Ecko ones from Value Village). I don't like having to peel a paper off my muffins so the pans had a few crumbs stuck to them. Once that hardened, I decided to give them a good (read: too long) soak. All that did was rust them up and leave stains on my sink. So I cleaned them up a bit, then decided to throw them out. Then I decided to offer them back to Value Village. Then I decided to list them on a free-for-the-taking site like declutterize or ReUseIt or freecycle. Then I decided to clean them with steel wool and extra-fine wet-dry sandpaper from Lee Valley. They still have a few stains on them, but they are in pretty good shape now. Remind me to write a note to myself to buy a few over-ripe bananas. And maybe some paper muffin cups, though I abhor the things.

There are few things that don't suffer from benign neglect -- dental health; my back yard; the vegetable crisper contents. In the garden, lilacs much prefer a sunny location over fertilization to bloom in the spring, and morning glory and nasturtium much prefer a poor soil, otherwise there's lots of foliage and few blooms.

And cat litter boxes.

I've got four of the poopy things. Cats, that is. Pet sites all recommend one litter box per cat plus one extra. I only have four boxes, but one of them is four feet long and two feet wide (it's an under-the-bed plastic storage box that didn't fit under the bed when I got it home). I was mortified when my attached neighbour asked me over. She was quite kind: asking me how I was doing, about the job hunt, and so on. Then she mentioned that the litter box smell was coming through our common basement wall into their upstairs. Augh! I immediately dumped and replaced the litter, after washing out the boxes with washing soda and sprinkling baking soda in the bottoms. I washed the floors with a liquid that's supposed to deodorize cat-smelling areas, and sprayed Febreze around.

Strangely, I suffer (or not) from life-long anosmia -- no sense of smell. So that makes benign neglect all that much easier for me.

And leave a comment if you want my very low-fat, no-sugar banana loaf recipe!