What to Do with Old Bananas

There are two places where I get bananas. One place sells the standard cluster of huge green Doles that you find in your typical American megamart. The other sells small, usually already ripe bunches of organic bananas. They might not even be organic, but they come with a generic-looking "Organic" sticker on them, so it must be legit, right?

The organic bananas aren't as good and cost more than the supermarket Doles. Plus, since they're already ripe in the store, that means that within a day of taking them home, you are suddenly the owner of a pile of brown, squishy bananas. When I am positively hankering for potassium, this is fine. But unless you eat two or three bananas a day, they will certainly go bad before the week is over. This means you're wasting precious potassium.

So today I learned how to make banana bread:

3 or 4 ripe bananas, smashed
1/3 cup melted butter
1 cup sugar (can easily reduce to 3/4 cup)
1 egg, beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon baking soda
Pinch of salt
1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour

"No need for a mixer for this recipe. Preheat the oven to 350°F. With a wooden spoon, mix butter into the mashed bananas in a large mixing bowl. Mix in the sugar, egg, and vanilla. Sprinkle the baking soda and salt over the mixture and mix in. Add the flour last, mix. Pour mixture into a buttered 4x8 inch loaf pan. Bake for 1 hour. Cool on a rack. Remove from pan and slice to serve."

Notes regarding this recipe: I used 3 bananas and 3/4 cup of sugar, so it will probably be a fairly small, not overly sweet loaf of bread. I mashed the bananas and butter with my hands to get a smoother texture than a spoon would yield, and I opted to sift the flour into the bowl in lieu of more specific instructions.