A Much Healthier Banana Bread

While I was doing my baking frenzy last week to get rid of as much kefir as possible, I remembered I had a bunch of frozen overripe bananas, so banana bread seemed like a really good idea. Unfortunately the really delicious banana bread I make has nothing remotely healthy except bananas, so I monkeyed with the recipe, changed flours, sugar and coconut oil for butter and came up with something a good bit healthier and still very tasty.
This is the result of my mad scientist experiment.

1 1/4 C whole wheat pastry flour (I imagine any ww would work)
3/4 C unbleached flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 C sugar (I used turbinado)
3 very well mashed bananas
2 tablespoons melted coconut oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 egg, beaten
1 C kefir or buttermilk
1/2 or so cup walnuts, chopped  (I probably used less)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease a loaf pan (I used coconut oil spray)  Mix all the dry ingredients together (flours, baking powder, baking soda and sugar) and whisk to blend well.  In a separate bowl mix the wet ingredients (Coconut oil, eggs.kefir, vanilla and bananas) until they are very well blended.  Stir the wet stuff into the dry stuff and mix until it is combined, but do not over mix.  Stir in the nuts, and spoon it out into the prepared loaf pan.  Bake about  20-25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean . (For a loaf like this I use spaghetti instead of a toothpick because it is longer and reaches the middle a little easier)

Remove  and let it cook at least 30 minutes before slicing.  When I made this by the original recipe I would cut the loaf in half and freeze 1 half while we ate the other. This time since I am eating no sugars and TheHub still has cake left, I froze the cake in 2 bags, one sliced and 1 unsliced, minus one tiny  slice (think business card paper thin slice so I could taste it)  It has much less of the bad stuff (butter, all white flour, granulated sugar) than the former recipe and delivered all the taste. (OK not all the taste, the old recipe had 3/4 cup sugar and 1/3 cup of butter so it is less sweet and has no buttery flavor, but I used an extra banana which compensated for the lesser sugar amount)  Unless I was doing a side by side comparison I would not really taste the difference.  If you want something sweet, full of flavor and not so bad for you give these a try!

p.s. I wrote this on. Sunday since I knew I would be gone this week. So far I have eaten Peruvian and French food (plus American stuff of course) with the promise of Latin tonight. Food heaven!  Oh and the whole 30 thing was over just in time!