PASTA E PISELLI 

Simple ingredients put together in a simple way.  Pasta, peas, water and cheese. It doesn't get any simpler or easier than this. You wouldn't think that simple things like this could come together in such a delicious way, but like magic, they do!  I love this.

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 There is something really comforting about a good banana bread. I have baked many through the years and have my favourites.  Family Favourite Banana Bread and Rich Banana Bread are two of my absolute favourites. 

The family favourite recipe is one I baked for my family for many years. It is moist and delicious.  The rich banana bread recipe is the banana bread I used to bake for the Mr when I worked at the manor down south. He had to have a loaf of it baked for him every week! It is also moist and delicious.

 Big Banana breads just are not practical in this house these days. I know I could freeze them but for me something is lost in the flavour when something is frozen. Maybe it is just in my head, I don't know for sure.

This recipe for Banana Chocolate Chip Bread for Two solves that problem. It makes one small Banana Bread, 5 1/2 by 3 inches in size. It is perfectly sized for the smaller family.

 This loaf may be small in stature, but it is big on flavour. It lacks nothing in the least of its much larger counterpart!

It is rich, moist, and delicious. There is only a tiny bit of fat in the form of 1 TBS of unsalted butter, melted. This is great because you end up with a bread that is not oily or greasy in the least.  Too many banana breads can end up this way.  Blech!

 It uses one small banana, about 1/4 cup of mashed banana. This means that there is plenty of banana flavour in this loaf.  

The abundance of natural sugars in bananas are the secret to a  moist and delicious Banana Bread. Make sure your bananas are nice and ripe before you use them in a banana bread.

 Ideally they should be starting to soften. The skin should be well spotted with brown flecks of colour. The more brown flecks the better! 

I have used bananas to make banana bread that most people would throw away. I am talking just about black in colour skin-wise.  They make the best banana breads.

 They mash beautifully and are the sweetest! Seriously!  I am a person who hates chunks of banana in my banana bread.

I want a smooth texture without lumps of banana. I do like toasted nuts in it, but no banana lumps! I am funny that way.

 If you use yellow  not-so-ripe bananas they just won't work right. They just don't have the sweetness and flavour of their over-ripe counterparts! 

They can even remain quite starchy after baking!  This is a big No No! There are a lot of theories out there about how to ripen bananas.

One of the best ways it to place them into a paper bag and shut it up, leaving them in there for a few days. This is the most effective method.

It does the job best. The bag traps the ethyene gas produced by ripening fruit. This in turn helps to speed up the process from the normal time of just leaving them on the counter-top. You will find you only need a day or two!

 I like toasted walnuts in my banana bread.  Banana and walnuts just are perfect partners. You could also use pecans. The Mr down south liked toasted pecans over walnuts.

I like both, but prefer the walnuts. I get that from my dad. He  is nuts about walnuts as well!  And of course as I tell you frequently, toasting your nuts just makes them nuttier!

I guess that means I will have to cut back on my peanut butter and toast supper.  Most nights that is what I have for my supper.  A slice of toast spread with peanut butter.  

Not a good thing in the long run I guess. Bad news for me who always has said that if I was marooned on a desert island I would want a jar of peanut butter and potatoes with me. Ho hum  . . .

 I really hope that you will want to bake this Banana bread if you are in a small family, and if you are not, maybe you will enjoy one of the larger loaves that I have linked up to here.  Also, if I was to small size another kind of quick bread, what would be your choice of smaller sized recipes you might like to see?  I aim to please! 

Usually at the weekend I like to bake us something that we can enjoy for breakfast or with a hot drink.  I do bake sweet things too.

I am not sure why I always bake at the weekend. I suppose it is a habit that started when I was working full time. I did not really have much time during the week to bake us anything special. We were lucky I managed to get dinner done!


The recipe I am sharing with you today for Sugar-Free Banana Nut Muffins has been adapted  from a cookbook of mine entitled Bread for Breakfast by Beth Hensperger.

It is filled with lots of baked Breakfast options, including muffins, loaves (both sweet and savoury, quick and yeasted), Scones, Biscuits, cornbreads, etc.

There are also a sections on coffee cakes and holiday bakes, pancakes and waffles, as well as butters, jams and fruit and cheese spreads.





Bananas are quite  sweet fruit and the longer you allow them to ripen the sweeter they get. The best bananas for baking are ones which are heavily speckled with brown, maybe even to the point where you think they are past it.

But they are not past it.  They are perfect and sweet and ready to be baked into muffins and loaves, cookies, cakes, etc.


These are lovely and moist.  There is buttermilk in the batter.  I love bakes with buttermilk. Buttermilk adds a special lightness and tenderness to bakes such as this.

It is an acid as well, so it helps to create a nice lift.  You always need to add bicarbonate of soda to a bake using something acidic like buttermilk, yogurt, sour cream, etc.


When baking soda is combined with the lactic acids of buttermilk, the acid neutralizes the metallic taste of sodium carbonate, and the batter will bubble and expand.


This is why when you are baking something with buttermilk and soda in it you need to get your bake into the oven as quickly as possible. This is to help take advantage of that chemical reaction. 

The heat of the oven will immediately increase the effects of that action giving you a nice tall and light bake. If you wait too long to put your bakes into the oven you will risk losing that effect, and in fact you will decrease the action of the buttermilk and the soda as well.


So speed is the key factor here.  Make sure you have your pan greased and everything ready to go as soon as you mix the wet and dry ingredients together!

So, no sugar.  These muffins have no sugar whatsoever.  I didn't mind.  The end result was not sweet at all actually. It was just right.  Just what I would expect a true muffin to taste like.

If you want sweet, you will have to add a bit of sugar into the mix.  I wouldn't think you would need a lot actually, maybe only 1 or 2 TBS of either caster sugar or soft light brown sugar.



We enjoyed them just as they were, served warm with some butter for spreading on top.  Look at the texture of these beauties.  I call that perfection.

The recipe only makes 9 muffins. That's another thing I liked about the recipe.  Nine muffins is a perfectly reasonable amount.  They also freeze really well according to the recipe.  Up to three months in an airtight container.



Baking things like this at the weekend means I also get to use my roll cover. My good friend Monique sent this sweet embroidered roll cover to me last year, or possibly even the year before, for my Birthday.

Every time I use it I cannot help but think of her, and her many kindnesses to me through the years.  Meeting good and kind people is one of the blessings you gain from being a member of the blogging community. 

Like is attracted to like. These sweet friendships are one of the things I love most about blogging. That sense of community. Oh sure there is the odd nasty person, or troll as they are called, but the good ones far outweigh them.



There are some pecans in these muffins.  Chopped pecans. I always like to toast my nuts before baking with them.  It doesn't take much of an effort.  It only takes a few minutes on a dry baking sheet in a hot oven.

They are done when they start to smell all nice and nutty. Do watch them however, as they can go from toasty to burnt in milliseconds.  Five to eight minutes at 200*C/400*F will do the trick.


You could also use walnuts if you prefer, or even leave the nuts out all together if you cannot abide nuts or are allergic.

You could add chocolate chips. Just saying.  I like semi-sweet chocolate chips or milk chocolate chips.  Both are quite nice in banana muffins. You could even add some berries.  Blueberries would be nice.





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