Recipes and Advice

 

Mom’s Banana Bread

   Recipes  May 11, 2015  0

Mom’s Banana Bread

 

A double batch of Mom's Banana Bread. 2 loaves fresh from the oven.

A double batch of Mom’s Banana Bread. 2 loaves fresh from the oven.

Ingredients:

2 medium sized, ripe bananas, mashed

1/2 cup butter or margarine

1 cup white sugar

2 cups flour

1/4 tsp. salt

2 eggs

1 tsp. baking soda

1/2 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

 

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 350°F.

Cream together butter, sugar, eggs and mashed bananas.

Mix dry ingredients together in a separate bowl.

Add dry ingredients to wet ingredients.

Stir in walnuts, if using.

Pour into loaf pan.

Bake for 1 hour.

 

Personal Notes:

I like to use 3 bananas when making this recipe. It takes longer to cook, but it has much more banana flavor. For 3 bananas in the recipe, it takes approximately half an hour longer to bake the loaf.

You’ll want to test your loaf to make sure it’s cooked by sticking a toothpick or a fork in to see if any rawness is left inside. If the toothpick or fork comes out clean it’s done. If it comes out with a tiny bit of raw dough, then it can come out because that tiny bit should cook even after it is out of the oven. If the fork or toothpick comes out gooey, then leave it in longer. How gooey will determine how much longer you need to cook your loaf for. Usually try no more than 10 minutes at a time between testing.

I also like to cook mine in glass loaf pans. To cook in glass, don’t forget to reduce the temperature by 25°F. So, in this case, that would have you cook your banana bread loaf at 325°F. The same cook-time applies.

Whatever you do, DO NOT pour your wet ingredients into your dry ingredients! This will make for a very stiff dough and a very dry loaf. The reason being is because not all measuring cups measure the same amount, even though they have the same measurements marked on them. So, when you mix this dough, be sure to mix the flour mixture little by little into the banana mixture, making sure you don’t make your dough too thick. Banana bread dough should be thicker than cake batter, but not as thick as bread dough. You shouldn’t be able to pick up the dough and handle it with your hands.

Walnuts, in my opinion, make this banana bread taste much better, so if you like walnuts, or are not allergic, I recommend using them every time.

This banana bread is great whether you eat it cold or warm. I personally like mine warmed with butter or margarine spread on each slice.

Freezes well, and can last in the freezer for a long time. It doesn’t usually last though, because it is so good, it gets eaten quickly!

Goes well with Banana Buttercream Frosting!

 

 

Banana Buttercream Frosting

   Recipes  May 11, 2015  0

Banana Buttercream Frosting

 

Banana Bread (used as a cake) with Banana Buttercream Icing.

Banana Bread (used as a cake) with Banana Buttercream Icing.

Ingredients:

2-3 medium ripe bananas

2 tsp. vanilla extract

1 tsp. lemon juice

2 cups softened butter

4 cups confectioners’ sugar

1 cup whipping cream

 

Instructions:

1. Peel bananas and place in a large bowl and mash.

2. Cream together the mashed bananas and the butter.

3. Add the confectioners’ sugar, vanilla, and lemon juice.

4. Mix on high with hand mixer until blended.

 

Personal Notes:

For this recipe, we used 3 bananas, however, 2 were medium, and 1 was small.

I’m not exactly sure how much icing this recipe makes but it will definitely cover a 2-layer 8″ square cake, and have some left over.

The lemon juice I would have to say is optional because it is used only to keep the bananas from going brown.

The cream might separate if you’re not careful, and this is mostly due to the lemon juice.

This frosting goes really well with banana bread, mostly because it is so buttery.

Frequent Urination Causes

Frequent Urination Causes

   Observations  May 06, 2015  0

Frequent Urination: Why Do I Pee So Much?

Girl having to pee. Frequent urination.

Frequent Urination: What is making me pee so much?

Obviously, frequent urination is common for pregnancy and for other medical conditions. But, what if you’re not pregnant? Or don’t have a medical condition? What, then, causes frequent urination in an otherwise healthy individual?

Many foods and drinks cause frequent urination.

I’ve taken note of a few things that I have noticed from experience, that cause the bladder to fill quickly, and give the urge to urinate often. Some of those things include but are not limited to:

Asparagus

I’ve noticed that whenever I eat asparagus, I have to pee, a lot. At first (after the asparagus), I couldn’t figure out why I had to pee so often. I didn’t think I ate or drank anything out of the ordinary. And then, after about 2 days of eating asparagus (the rest of the diet the same as always), my bladder would fill in about 5-10 minutes. Of course, this is extremely annoying when trying to sleep. And the effects would last for a whole day or more. So I looked it up online. I only found 1 reference in an obscure post that talked about frequent urination; most posts and articles only talk about the “smell” of the urine after consuming asparagus. Hence why it is important to write this article to tell people that YES, asparagus can and will make you pee often.

Broccoli
Broccoli. It causes frequent urination.

Broccoli, one of many foods that cause frequent urination.

Of course, I thought it was just the asparagus that had this affect. I was wrong. I had some steamed broccoli, and lo and behold, my bladder was filling within 1 hour. Again, since nothing in the diet has changed, this leads me to conclude that it is the broccoli that is causing the frequent urination.

This gets me thinking, if asparagus makes me pee, and broccoli makes me pee, then what other vegetables would cause the same effect? Is it limited to green vegetables? Or is it the type of vegetable? Both asparagus and broccoli are green, however, they are both stems of undeveloped buds. So, trials would need to be done in order to test either of these theories.

Cooked or Raw?

Then there’s the overlooked “cooked vs. raw” issue. Does it make a difference on the body (for urination purposes) whether or not the veggies are cooked? Do these vegetables only act as a diuretic when cooked? Or do they act the same raw? Unfortunately, right now I don’t have the means to test this out.

And it’s not just the vegetables that cause the need to pee. I recently discovered yet ANOTHER reason for the full bladder so often. Excess protein.

Protein

Yes, excess protein causes frequent urination. I only discovered this one because I started working out and drinking protein shakes. And of course, with working out, you not only have your instant protein with the shake, you are also eating protein. So, what happens? Your body can’t process all that protein to turn it into muscle for you, so you end up peeing it out.

I tell you, from experience, too much protein is like drinking coffee, where even just a little bit will cause you to pee almost constantly for hours after the fact. Too much protein comes out as pee.

Coffee

As most people already know, coffee is a diuretic and it causes frequent urination. It also makes your pee smell funny; I’ve dubbed it “caffeine pee”.

Milk

Milk will also cause frequent urination. I have yet to test whether this is organic milk, or non-organic milk, but milk can cause a bladder to fill very quickly.

Alcohol

Again, most people already know that alcohol will cause a very frequent urination. Once you pee, you can’t seem to stop and your bladder just fills and fills; I’ve heard this called “breaking the seal”.

Milk and Alcohol Combined

A strange little tidbit that I noticed in my trials is that when I mixed milk and alcohol (vodka in particular) the effects of the frequent urination in both the milk and the alcohol seemed to cancel each other out.

My theory on as to why (and I’ve written about this before in my recipe forum recipehelpers.com) is because alcohol is draining your body’s water, therefore dehydrating you, while milk is giving you excess water. So what happens is, instead of the alcohol dehydrating you, it takes the excess, or allows for the milk to rehydrate, and your body balances itself out. In some ways this makes perfect sense, and in others it doesn’t, but I do know that combining the two frequent urination causing beverages, there is no frequent urination effect.

Tea

Some, but not all tea, causes, for me at least, frequent urination. Drinking black tea and green tea, with sugar or honey, doesn’t cause the urgent need to pee. However, other teas can cause the bladder to fill within minutes. I haven’t tested many teas, but it seems that for me, anything other than black or green teas make me have to pee. I recently had jasmine tea, and boy did I have to pee within 10 minutes of having just a sip; and I continued to pee every 10 to 20 minutes for hours afterward.

Other Things

I’m sure there are many other things that cause frequent urination, but this is the list that I have gathered based on personal experience. If you have other things that you have noticed that make you pee often, feel free to list them in the comments below.