October 26, 2010

Pumpkin/banana bread + awesome salsa

This recipe I got from The Cooking Club of America. To be honest, I didn’t play around with it too much to try to make it less calories, I made it as is, and tried to keep the portion I ate smaller! This bread is delicious and moist. And of course if I had chocolate chips, those would have gone in as well.

After I made this, I did figure out the calories, and if this loaf is 14 slices, then each slice is this, which I didn’t think was that bad!

Ingredients:

1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp. ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp. ground cloves
1 1/3 cups sugar
1 stick of butter, softened
1 cup canned pumpkin
2 very ripe bananas (optional)
2 eggs

Mix all the ingredients together and put in a 9×5 bread loaf pan coated with Pam Cooking spray. Bake at 350 degrees for 60-65 minutes, or until the edges start to pull away from the pan or a toothpick inserted comes out clean. Mine was more like 70 minutes. Cool on a wire rack.

You can serve as is, or make a glaze with powdered sugar/milk

Glaze:

1 cup powdered sugar
1 tablespoon milk
1/4 tsp. vanilla

Stir until smooth, then drizzle over the loaf.

Since I had more pumpkin than I needed, I made another batch of these except I made 48 mini muffins!

If you make the mini muffins, bake for about 10 minutes. Here is the nutritional information for that:

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Pretty much every weekend I’ve been making a different version of salsa. This weekend I used 4 tomatoes from my Mom’s garden, 1 big poblano pepper, 1/4 of a white onion, 4 cloves of garlic, pinch of salt and cooked that in a dry large non-stick skillet until it starts to blacken on all sides. One tip, keep the paper on the garlic so it doesn’t get bitter, then before putting it in the blender, take the paper off. Also, before blending, take the top off the poblano pepper and remove the seeds. For the tomatoes, I just added them as is.