I was very fortunate the other day to be given a large bag of soft bananas _ the vital ingredient to one of our favourite sweet treats, banana bread.
Bananas are a potassium super food and the goodness in them is maintained during the cooking process. Potassium stimulates your muscles, nerves and brain cells, and can also help reduce blood pressure and the risk of stroke.
Banana bread is great because it stays fresh and moist for a long time (if you can keep it away from the family for long enough), and it freezes perfectly for when you need something in a hurry. I have kept banana bread in the freezer for four months and found that it still tasted freshly-baked on thawing.
I like to change ours up a bit; sometimes I add desiccated coconut, other times chocolate chips, different nuts or dried fruit.
You will notice that I use a little lemon juice in the recipe. The reason for this is that banana is not acidic and therefore there is little to react with the baking soda. To make sure there is no residual flavour of unused baking soda after the rising reaction has finished, we can add a little acid by way of lemon juice to help it along.
