From Scratch

In the last two years I have realized how much I HATE wasting money. Two years ago, the problem that I was most often running into was throwing away food that we didn't eat in time. Well in the last 6 months, my husband & I spend at least $100 less a month on groceries because we 1. cut out some snacks (we were buying too much) and 2. we buy less so that we don't have to throw out food. Keeping those changes in mind, I still have thrown out a handful of bananas. In the back of my mind, I always thought "I could make banana bread with those" but I was always too nervous to bake banana bread from scratch.

I am AWESOME at baking something from a box, but from scratch...well I have very little confidence & very little experience. I tried making an apple pie last year and that was OKAY. But today I believe that my banana bread was pure SUCCESS!

This is the recipe that I used, which is not my own. I did everything that she recommended other than adding walnuts-we didn't have any...but we did have all of the other ingredients. Click Here  to view the recipe.

Here are some pics:

I was going to attempt to use my bread maker for the first time, but I couldn't make sense of the directions, so I used the oven!

This is what the mixture looked like before I put it in the oven. It may be darker than normal because I used non-bleached wheat flour.

I thought that I did not but too much of the mixture in the pan (considering that I followed a recipe), but it turned out that the bread started to overflow a tad when it was in the oven & I had to put a baking sheet underneath it. Moral of the story, put less of the mixture in your pan than I did!