blue artichoke

Frozen ripe bananas have black skins and a more pronounced banana flavor than do fresh ripe ones. So I usually have a few bananas in my freezer, chilling out (pun intended) and waiting to be made into banana bread. I always use the same recipe for banana bread. It is my grandmother's recipe that was passed along to my mom, and then to me. My mom made a few alterations to the recipe and I have made further changes. It's pretty close to perfect. But still I keep collecting recipes for banana bread, thinking that maybe I'll find something even better. There could be a gem, but I'd never know because I never stray. Until now. I have around 20 recipes that I'll test over the course of the next few months to see if any can rival my grandmother's. The Ultimate Snackdown Banana Bread Battle has begun!

First up: Cream Cheese-Banana-Nut Bread:
The recipe is from the Southern Living Cooking School 2005. I omitted the nuts. Sometimes I like nutty banana bread, but usually I don't. The bread has to be good on its own. I used 3 bananas from my freezer and fat-free cream cheese. The result was a very thick batter that baked into a golden brown loaf with a nice thick crust and a moist crumb. The addition of cream cheese made the loaf rather dense, like a pound cake. The flavor is delicately sweet and, because the bananas were stirred instead of beaten into the batter, there are chunks of banana throughout the bread. A mighty fine start, I must say. This banana bread is really, really good. Like sneak to the fridge in the middle of the night good.

Dinner last night: leftover beef & noodle casserole; green beans
Dinner tonight: ?