Day-O (The Banana Boat Breakfast)

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banana, banana fritters, bananas, breakfast, deadly delicious, food, fritters, Jamaica, jamaican recipe, maple syrup, pancake, recipe, tempeh, tempeh bacon, vegan, vegan jamaican recipe, vegan recipe

Like seriously dem banana fridders! A mon, a mi fi tell ya! Awoah!

Banana Fritters – Breakfast

Oh…I almost forgot I’m not in Jamaica and you probably didn’t understand a word I just said! Well that’s because I’m just pretending to be able to speak Jamaican Patois and I probably said gibberish!
But one taste of these amazing banana fritters and I promise warm breezes, sand between your toes, time slowing down and if your imagination is vivid enough you’ll even smell that hint of herbal smoke in the air! Well that is if you fall deep into your daydreaming and forget to turn off the stove, burning the fritters and making the smoke alarm go off! I don’t recommend that part!

These fritters are deadly delicious! You can have these for breakfast with some tempeh bacon, as I did. You can have them for desert with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and some rum drizzled all over them. Or you can just eat them as is, as a snack to give you a boost of power on your long hikes. They are perfect, just like bananas are!

I’ve been told that the traditional recipe didn’t normally use eggs. Though now a days they do add eggs for some reason! So lets go back to the basics and make this the vegan version. It’s such an easy recipe!

Fry ’em up good

Ingredients:
3 ripe Bananas, mashed
1/4 cup Almond milk
3/4 cup All Purpose unbleached Flour
2 tsp Baking Powder
1/2 tsp fresh nutmeg (or more to taste)
pinch of Salt
2-3 tbsp Vegetable Oil

Directions:
In a medium bowl add almond milk to mashed bananas and mix well. Add flour, baking powder, nutmeg and salt and mix to incorporate everything.
Add a tablespoon of oil to frying pan and put on high heat. When oil is hot (not smoking), add a heaping table spoons of batter to the frying pan and flatten with the end of your spoon. Reduce heat to medium high, and flip fritters pretty quickly. These fry up pretty quickly due to the high sugar content of the bananas. When you flip to the other side, you want to squish it down, so that it flattens a bit. Remove and place on paper towel to remove excess oil.

Banana Fritter Breakfast

This recipe makes about 12 fritters or 4 servings. At just under 250 calories for 3 fritters in a serving, it’s neither good nor that bad. But most of the calories are coming from the bananas, and there are no refined sugars. So I’d say it’s something to indulge in and not feel that guilty about. In fact, if you wanted to make this in to a healthy snack you could add a half a cup of crushed walnuts and it’d be a great breakfast to have after a great morning run!

So When I was trying to think of a clever title for this post, something to do with bananas and Jamaica, the song Day-O came to mind. Of course, the first time I heard that song and many other great songs was on the Muppet Show! Here it is for your enjoyment:
The Muppet Show. Harry Belafonte – Day-O (Banana Boat Song)

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When banana math fails you!

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banana, bananas, bread, breakfast, desert, loaf, lunch, recipe, snack, vegan

Every time I see all those bananas piled up high in the grocery store in their tantalising yellow aura, promises of sunshine and sandy beaches, I’m drawn to them immediately! I buy a nice big bunch and I will eat one or maybe even two right away on the drive home. I’ll eat another one the next day and maybe another one the day after, and then I just forget about them and they sit on the kitchen counter day after day while their yellow aura starts to fade. They become a dark shadow of the fruit they once were. It’s just sad! That’s when banana math has failed you! Or more accurately you’ve failed the banana math! I should have just bought 4, but I couldn’t help myself and bought a huge bunch of 7 instead!

Aged Bananas

It’s time to give those tired old bananas a good new life in the form of banana bread! What the banana lacked as a youth they have plenty of as an aged fruit, and that’s sweetness, perfect for a loaf, cake, cookies or any other desert you’d like a touch of sweetness and a little less processed sugar. A long time ago I had a recipe for banana bread that had either Kahlua or strong coffee just to give it that little bit of somethin’ somethin’! But I was never able to find it, so no problem, I came up with my own. I have tweaked this recipe a bit here and a bit there, and I’m sure I’ll tweak it some more. In fact I think this one didn’t have enough of that coffee flavour, so either just leave out the Kahlua, or add a bit more.

Ingredients:

In goes the Banana Bread

1/2 cup soy or almond milk plus 1 tsp apple cider vinegar
2 cup bananas (about 3), mashed
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 oz Kahlua
2 cup unbleached All purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup chocolate chips (optional – as if it’s optional, just do it)
1/2 cup walnuts, or pecans (optional – but seriously you should!)

Add the vinegar to your non-dairy milk and let it sit in the measuring cup or any ol’ cup will do, and let it curdle while you mash up the bananas. Mix sugars with the mashed up bananas, add the Kahlua, vanilla and the curdled non-dairy milk and mix well. In another bowl mix all the dry ingredients except the chocolate chips and the nuts. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and mix well. If the mixture looks too wet, add some more flour a tablespoon at a time. It really depends on the ripeness of your banana, as the ripper your bananas are the more moisture they holds. I’ve added up to 1/3 cup more flour because my bananas were basically mush. Finally add the chocolate chips and walnuts and fold them into the dough. If you haven’t done so do it now, preheat your oven to 350 degrees Celsius. Pour the batter into a greased 9 x 5 x 13 loaf pan, bang it up on the kitchen counter to even out the dough in the pan and bake for an hour. If the knife test comes out clean with no stuck on batter, then it’s baked all the way through. If not then bake it at 2 minute intervals until it passes the knife test. Cool on a rack for a few minutes before cutting up slices and devouring it with some Earth Balance.

What a loaf of banana bread!

You might notice that there isn’t any oil in the ingredients list. In all honesty I forgot it when I was making the loaf this time around. But I didn’t even notice it as far as taste was concerned. You are more than welcome to add 1/3 cup oil to the wet ingredients, or have an extra bit Earth Balance when you’ve toasted a slice as I did. If you can hold yourself back from the Earth Balance, a nice thick slice of this banana bread has only 255 calories per slice, 10% of your daily iron, and a whopping 200 mg of potassium. It’s also high in Folate, Magnesium, Vitamin B-6 and Thiamin from the walnuts! But most importantly it’s delicious and I passed the Banana Math by using up all the bananas I bought from the grocery store!