Breads

Banana Nut Bread

“A great banana bread made without eggs”

One day I arrived home from work and felt like baking something sweet to surprise my wife when she came home. I didn’t have a lot in the house in the way of sweets. I started flipping through the “sweet recipe” scrapbooks I had made from my grandmothers recipes. I looked through the one with cakes and decided I just didn’t have that much time to bake and frost a cake. I looked through the random desserts, nothing jumped out at me. Then came the cookie book and again I had none of the ingredients in the house. As I was closing that scrapbook I looked over and saw 3 very ripe bananas. Now I’m very particular about the bananas I eat. My wife gives me a hard time because I only like bananas that have a little green and absolutely NO brown on them at all. These bananas had been on my counter for a while and were long past the point of peeling and eating. So it hit me, BANANA NUT BREAD!!!!! 

It would be easy, I had all the ingredients, and it is one of my wife’s favorites. As you can tell I try to be a good husband when I can. I had made a scrapbook for breads, as the pages turned there was no banana nut bread recipe. I thought how can that be, their has to be at least one recipe. I started to turn each page slowly and look closer at each recipe and finally found a very faded, small and hard to read recipe for what looked like banana nut bread.

I looked at it and decided I would give it a try. So I gathered all the ingredient and started. I know my grandmother would make this recipe with walnuts because that was what she loved to bake with and eat. I’m not a big fan of walnuts, for really no particular reason, I just prefer pecans. Any kind of nuts would work great in this recipe so feel free to use your favorite.

As I started a couple thing stood out as strange in the recipe. First off there were no instructions other than the ingredient list and how long to bake it for. Then I noticed that it called for only 1 tbsp of shorting which seemed like an extremely small amount of fat in the recipe. I’m used to making sweet breads with at least one stick of butter. I wanted to try and stay true to the recipe as much as possible, so I decided to increase the shortening to 2 tbsp. Then there was no salt, no spices and no vanilla. I added a pinch of salt, some fresh grated nutmeg, and a splash of vanilla extract.

I mixed the ingredients like I normally would for a recipe like this and poured into a greased loaf pan. Into the oven it went. Then all of a sudden, the light bulb went off, I realized there was an important ingredient missing!!!!! I double checked the recipe and realized I didn’t forget the eggs, it wasn’t written in the ingredients list. I thought it has to be a mistake that grandma must have forgotten to write it down. It was to late to do anything about it so I waited patiently while the bread bake. When the timer went off I tested it with a toothpick and removed it from the oven to cool.

The bread looked like every other recipe for banana nut bread. However, I was really anxious to see what the inside looked like, after all I have seen and eaten some beautiful food that tasted terrible. When the loaf was sliced, I was extremely surprised, it looked great! After dinner my wife had a piece and loved it, she said it tasted great. I still to this day have a hard time understanding why this recipe  works so well with out eggs and such a small amount of fat but it does. I guess I shouldn’t worry about it and just enjoy the simplicity of this recipe.

Enjoy!!!!!

Mash bananas

Combine dry ingredients

mix sugar and shortening

add dry ingredients and bananas

fold in vanilla and pecans

pour into prepared pan

bake until golden brown!!!!

Hot Rolls

Grandma’s Dinner Rolls

Light, fluffy, and moist with a perfect texture just like grandma used to make!!

Dinner rolls or “hot rolls” as they may also be know are a must have for any dinner table where I’m from. Every family has a special dinner roll recipe that graces the table on every special holiday dinner and most times during weekly dinner if time permits.

These rolls bring me right back to my childhood!! When I was growing up all of my grandparents lived less than 30 minutes from our house. My mom’s mother lived the closest and would come to our house every Tuesday, as long as she didn’t have special events going on at her church. It was a great time! She would usually come late morning or early afternoon and spend most of the day, help mom with dinner and just spend quality time with me. She would bring something for dessert, usually donuts, which is a story for another time!!!! She would also bring her homemade hot rolls and bake them right before dinner. There was nothing in this world like them! They were light and fluffy, had a great buttery flavor, nicely browned on top and not one bit dry. She would bring them Tuesday after Tuesday after Tuesday after Tuesday……………….if you haven’t caught my drift they got a little old after all those years. Just like anything, else if you have to much of anything it can get boring.

My Grandmother passed away right after I had graduated high school. For the longest time I really didn’t think much about these rolls since I was going to college, getting a job, and marrying the love of my life. When ever I thought of grandma these hot rolls always came to mind. I never came across a dinner roll that reminded me of her recipe. Once I started this project of organizing the family  recipes, I thought for sure I could find the recipe for her rolls. But like many things in life this was not as easy as I thought. I found 6 different dinner roll recipes, 3 of which I knew where her recipes, being that they were in her handwriting. The other 3, I didn’t know who they belonged to. Two of her recipes where incomplete and the other one just didn’t turn out right.

So I was back at square one on my search for grandmas hot rolls.

I looked through cookbooks, on websites, and even double and triple checked my familys’ recipes and couldn’t find one that was satisfying to me. Finally, I took all the recipes and re-read over each one carefully and started working out a hot roll recipe. After a couple attempts, the hot rolls I remembered all those years ago where born out of the oven in my very own kitchen.

Now, these rolls aren’t exactly as I remember her’s, but every time I bite into one it transports me back to my youth. The first time I made these for my family, it was Easter and I made 2 batches (30 rolls). We had 10 people for dinner that Easter and every roll disappeared. People were even wanting more.

The great thing about this recipe is that it uses fast rise yeast which really speeds up the process. Also they are easy to make a day ahead of time. All you have to do is refrigerate overnight after the final rise. Then the next day set the rolls out and let rise to room temp about 2 to 3 hours. Then bake as normal.

I highly recommend that you use a stand mixer like a kitchenmaid, which my grandmothers’ is still going strong and it has to be about 25 years + old. You can knead by hand but if you have a stand mixer you might as well use it.

The one suggestion I will make is after you divide the dough into the individual roll portions, the easiest way to shape them is to take one roll portion of dough. Flatten it under the palm of your hand. After flattening slowly, while still moving hand in a circular motion, bring your finger tips to the board. Increase the speed of the circular motion of your hand until your hand forms a cage around the ball of dough and is moving around to form a perfect ball.

It is kind of hard to explain but this link to Father Dominic, which I saw on PBS, explains it much better than I can. Check this link out before starting this recipe it will save you tons of time.                                                                                                                 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVeFJEbodko

Enjoy!

Combine the wet ingredients

Stir in instant yeast

and part of the flour

Using a dough hook slowly add remaining flour

This is what do will look like after combined

At the end of the kneading time this is what you have

Let rest

Will double in size

Divide into 15 pieces. (I divided mine into more by accident so I add the smaller ones together)

Brush with melted butter and cover and let rise

(This is where, after the final rise, you could refrigerate overnight and set out about 2 hours before baking if making ahead)

Right out of the oven

Brushed with melted butter

Viola!! a perfect dinner roll

These rolls are perfect with just butter but you could add jelly, jams, apple butter etc…… anything you could think of .