Baking (feat. Quinoa)




A loaf of banana bread is a beautiful thing. Especially when laden with toasty bits of pecan. And even more so when the whole package is healthy.


In our quest to eat cleaner (ignore the last post), M and I have been on the hunt for healthier baking recipes, because baked goods are ubiquitous in this busy Atlantic household.  Healthy recipes that are actually delicious are surprisingly hard to come by. This particular one makes use of two of our staples du jour, quinoa and Greek yogurt, which together cut the amount of fat and flour used in traditional banana bread, and make us feel a little bit better about ourselves.  


The loaf is pleasantly crispy on the outside, and soft, spicy, and a tiny bit dense on the inside, a lovely combination best enjoyed with a hot coffee. Or before consuming a package of Mini Eggs.


Quinoa pecan banana bread
Adapted from here

Ingredients
- 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
- 1/2 cups sugar
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp cinnamon
- 1/2 tsp allspice
- 1/8 tsp salt
- 2 very ripe bananas, mashed
- 1 cup cooked and cooled quinoa
- 1 egg, lightly beaten
- 1/4 cup unsalted butter, melted
- 1/4 cup plain Greek yogurt (low fat or fat-free)
- 2/3 cup pecans, chopped

Prep time: 10 min
Bake time: 50 min
Total time (incl. quinoa cooking time): 1 hour 30 min

Makes 1 9" loaf

1. Cook quinoa as directed, and cool for about 30 minutes.

2. Preheat oven to 350F and line a loaf pan with parchment paper, or spray with cooking spray; set aside.

3. In a medium bowl, mix flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, spices, and salt. In a separate, large bowl, combine the banana, quinoa, egg, melted butter and yogurt; mix well.

4. Add the dry ingredients, 1/2 cup at a time, to the wet ingredients and mix until just incorporated (do not over-mix!). Stir in the pecans.

5. Pour into prepared loaf pan and bake for 50-60 minutes, or until tester comes out clean. Remove and let cool in the pan for about 10 minutes, then remove from the pan and cool completely on a wire rack.

6. Store at room temperature for up to 5 days in an airtight container or freeze in a well-sealed Ziploc bag.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Scone Witch

Image
There is an amazing little restaurant in the outskirts of downtown Ottawa called The Scone Witch, which makes scones in more varieties than you can imagine.   Savory scones with ingredients such as fragrant rosemary, cheese and scallions; sweet scones in which are embedded bits of candied ginger and tiny, tangy currants. M and I ate there recently, and our exceptional lunch reminded me of how much I love the decadent and infinitely adaptable pillows of butter and cream. I have previously only attempted to make scones once – the effort, thought valiant, was somewhat subpar – but this week I decided to try my hand at it again. In browsing the web, a recipe caught my eye, from my favorite food blog, Smitten Kitchen (featured prominently in many of my posts). The recipe, though not too labor-intensive, took more time than I had anticipated, and M and I ended up indulging quite late in the night. A delicious bedtime snack, no doubt, but also the recipe for a b...
Read more

Birthday torte

Image
M loves chocolate, adores it in fact. He will always make a beeline for the chocolatiest dessert on the menu at dinner, and we always have some iteration of dark chocolate stashed away somewhere in the apartment. So, it seemed appropriate that his birthday cake request was as chocolately as birthday cakes get, in the best way of course. Home for the weekend, we spent a lovely, relaxed evening together, starting with a fantastic dinner at Brooklyn Warehouse, a low-key bistro in Halifax's North End; definitely a culinary gem in the city. Dessert was, of course, M's cake of choice; a luxuriously rich torte made with a sinful amount of dark chocolate and butter, bourbon syrup and just a touch of flour to hold the whole thing together. We paired it with a sweet-tart mixed berry-orange compote, scotch, and 'Blade Runner'. Bayou chocolate torte with bourbon and dark chocolate, with mixed berry-orange compote (recipe to follow) From 'Rebar Modern Food Cookbook...
Read more

Decadence

I am recovering from a weekend of gastronomic hedonism. Too much sushi, wine, 4 am pizza (incidentally, the best ever, even the next morning), poutine, more ethanol, maple syrupy French toast etc etc etc….so good, but 48 hours of indulgence leaves one feeling a bit….heavy. As would be expected, lethargy descended upon us on a cold and rainy spring Sunday night, and all I wanted to was to eat something filling, that was easy to make, and that was light . Because let’s face it, this squid’s diet can only take so much of a beating. So I turned to my old stand-by, Madhur Jaffrey, the queen of vegetarian and Indian, cooking. She hold a special place in my culinarily-inclined heart, ever since I discovered her classic cookbook in my mother’s cupboard a few years ago, “An Introduction to Indian Cooking”, which is unfortunately now out of print. Her’s is one of the only cookbooks that my mom has that is not annotated to death – it’s as though every recipe she writes has been tested to perfe...
Read more