I’ve craved banana bread since I cut my teeth, and I’ve been baking it since I was tall enough to turn on an oven, always using the same 1950s Betty Crocker recipe: bananas, white flour, white sugar, oil, soda and salt. It was delish! But fast forward 40 years and delish with a side of fat doesn’t elicit that same kind of food joy anymore.

I could sense a banana bread craving coming on last week in the grocery store when I fantasized that the semi-green bananas were all speckled brown, their peels limp and detaching from the stem. I wiped the drool off my lip and bought a group of four. When I got home, I set them on the kitchen counter to ripen, and pored over my cook books for an anti-Betty banana bread recipe.

Being the healthy foodie wannabe that I am, one of my favorite celebrities is Today Show nutritionist Joy Bauer. I had the good fortune of meeting her in 2009 when I was inducted into the Joy Fit Club. In 2010, she published a cookbook called “Slim and Scrumptious” from which I found the perfect anti-Betty banana bread recipe.

The bananas were the perfect color last night, so even though I got home at 8:00 from Cassie’s, I had to make the bread or it would be too late. I was dressed in my son-in-laws pajama bottoms because when poor, sick grandbaby Mae was snuggling on my lap, she was so out of it she didn’t tell me she had to sit on her froggie potty and she peed all over me. I saved the leather couch, though! Matt was so grateful that he let me borrow his pajamas. They’re so comfy he might not get them back!

You know you’ve achieved perfect ripeness when the bananas are easy to smoosh with a fork.

The recipe calls for toasted pecans. As Joy points out in the book, toasting them deepens the flavor of the nuts so don’t skip that part! While she suggests roasting them whole in the oven and then chopping them, I chopped them first and roasted them on the stove. PotAto, potaato…

One of the reasons I love to cook is that my kitchen utensils and pans often have a story to tell. While I buy kitchen equipment for practical purposes, sometimes they way in which a pan or spoon or cutting board was acquired and from whom have meaning beyond their function. For instance, I love any excuse to use my antique green juicer. It belonged to my former neighbor, Hazel Blish (rest her soul), and I bought it at her estate auction. Blishie, as she liked to be called, was a dear, sweet old woman who wore pant suits to our backyard picnics and her face perfectly made up with eye liner and red lipstick. My daughter, Carlene, used to clean her house and help her plant geraniums every year. Blishie started losing her memory a few years before she died. We realized it after this phone conversation:

Me: Hello?

Blishie: Hi, Lynn. This is Blishie next door. Can I have your phone number?

Me: Ummm…Blishie…you called me, remember?

Blishie: Oh, I did?

So…anyway, using her juicer reminds me of that sweet lady who was one of the last of a generation of women who never wore jeans or left home without being coiffed.

As Tom Petty sang, “The waiting is the hardest part.” Banana bread doesn’t happen instantaneously, like a bowl of cereal. You have to wait for the bananas to ripen. (However, you can freeze ripe bananas until you want to use them. Peel them first before putting them in freezer bags. Let them thaw before smooshing them.) Then once the batter is mixed, you have to wait another hour before it’s done and then another 30 minutes before it’s cool enough to handle. But it’s soooo worth the wait! (That slice there? The crust? Yeah….that was my nearly guiltless reward.)

So if you’re into banana bread and not into fat, give Joy’s recipe a try. I promise you won’t miss the oil.

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