Perils of Cooking Healthy

Who here is a foodie? I'm not. But I am interested in eating healthy food, despite the fact that I prefer the other kind. lol

I have a banana bread recipe from my mother-in-law, who is an excellent cook. I've been making it for years, and the family loves it. But - it has a lot of sugar and butter in it, plus white flour. I looked around for something 'healthier'.

I found an oatmeal-based recipe which I quite like. But no one else does. So now, when I want to make banana bread, I need to make two batches, based on two totally different recipes. Here's a photo, with the guilty culprit alongside.

Today was baking day. I had four overripe bananas, two for each loaf. My recipe is done in a food processor. Her recipe calls for creaming the sugar and butter together (ugh), beating the egg, sifting the flour with the spices, etc. Most importantly, hers calls for sour milk. So I have to take the milk out early in the day. It so happened I didn't get to the bread yesterday, so I put the milk in the fridge for overnight and took it out again today.

So, I had my sour milk, right? It goes in at the end and you have to alternate the milk with the flour mixture. It's a fair bit of work as compared with mine of just throwing everything in a bowl and hitting the switch. (Who do you think is the better cook?)

I got to work. Assembling, measuring, cleaning. All told, it took me a full two hours to make both recipes. Put them in the oven. Whew. My husband was looking forward to his banana bread.

Discovered I had left the sour milk out of MIL's recipe. Whoops. After babysitting that darn bowl of milk for two days, I had managed to forget all about it. I had too much going on. Dishes and implements and ingredients everywhere. What to do? The loaf had been in the oven ten minutes already. Hubby was so disappointed, which made me sad, as I only do the extra work for him. The kids don't really care about the banana bread.

This is why I don't like to cook. Too much effort and too many things go wrong.

But I will say, when it was all done, he cut off a big piece and ate it with good cheer, pronouncing it 'not bad'. Now look at the photo. Can you guess which is the 'healthy' bread and which the 'unhealthy'?

I do have a daughter who's an avid baker, and I used her as the model for my heroine in Love Charm for Carlotta. Carlotta runs a bakery in Martha's Vineyard. She doesn't believe in love charms. But when the bad boy hockey player from her past re-appears in her life, something wild and wonderful is fighting with her common sense.

Love Charm for Carlotta