Date Banana Bread

On my quest to use dates in as many things as I can, I made date banana bread yesterday. My family loves banana bread so I decided to try to make it with dates for the first time. It was delicious, alhamdulillah.

My base recipe came from Banana Date Nut Bread from the Deenbros.com site.

I basically followed the directions except:

Sugar: The recipe calls for 1 cup of sugar. My oldest daughter said it sounded like you'd get diabetes from that so I only used 1/2 cup of sugar. You could probably use even less than that as dates and bananas can be very sweet on their own and I did see recipes calling for no sugar.

Butter: The recipe calls for butter but in quick breads, I generally use vegetable oil, which is what I used. 

Dates: The recipe calls for chopped dried dates, but I used our moist medjool dates. I put them in a bowl of water and microwaved for about 2.5 minutes, then I let them stand in the water til they were even mushier.  After that, I put the dates and water in the blender. Now, the next time through, inshaa Allah, I won't add in all the water that I had in the bowl as it made the date-water mixture very soupy. But I still poured it in the banana bread mix and it came out moist and delicious!

Now with my Date Banana Smoothie, I am 2-0 on date recipes this Ramadan!

Date Banana Smoothie

During Ramadan, I go bonkers over recipes that include dates. Not everyone in the family likes dates, but I love them.  The first time I had a date shake, I was hooked.  Last year I bought a blender so ever since then we've been making all kinds of shakes and smoothies. (We didn't have a blender for years).

After surfing online to find a date banana smoothie recipe, I basically just threw one together myself as I didn't have some of the other ingredients that made the recipes I saw a little more exotic.

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup dates or about 4-5 medjool dates (pitted)
• 1-1/2  cups milk (I used almond soy milk though)
• 2 teaspoons chia seeds (optional, but one of the recipes I looked at called for them and I had them on hand so I used them. The recipe did advise soaking the chia seeds, but this was last minute so I threw them in anyway)
• 1 banana

And that's it! In my recently old sugar addict days I would have dumped way too much sugar in there but now I enjoy smoothies and shakes with no sugar at all! If it is not sweet enough, you could add a bit of honey or, sometimes, if a smoothie isn't sweet enough, I'll add another banana.

I saw some recipes that called for adding yogurt (my daughter said that just didn't sound right, lol, so I trusted her as she is my expert smoothie maker, having surpassed me in the art of smoothie/shake making). 

What to Do

Place everything in the blender (my blender recommends adding the liquid first) and blend. I probably needed to blend it a bit more as I had a lot of date chunks at the bottom of my glass (but they were still delicious to eat by themselves at the end.

My refreshing date banana smoothie at the end of a day of fasting:

Dates, Dates, Dates!

Repost from 2010. We lived in the UAE from 2009 to 2012.

We’ve been blessed this year to have a house with date palm trees, alhamdulillah:

On the first day of Ramadan the boys got some dates from the tree. Their haul, alhamdulillah:

So far, we’ve broken all our fasts with dates and water, ma sha Allah and we’ve only eaten about half the dates.

We Made Date Cake

http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/1542/sticky+date+cake+with+caramel+sauce#null

….and we love Date Milk. The kids love to make date milk by pitting dates, and boiling them in water to form a runny paste then adding milk and straining it.

Health Benefits of Dates

I was reading up on the health benefits of dates and came across these articles:

Health Benefits of Dates (Organic facts.com)

Benefits of Dates

It's a Date! (A Unit Study on the Date Fruit)

Back in 2011 I wanted my kids to learn about dates. I looked all around the internet and couldn't find any unit studies on them. So I decided to make one.  This is my 42 page unit study on the date palm and its fruit.

Here's what it contains:

Download It's a Date Unit Study

Note: in the unit study, there is a link to The Four Types of Dates (originally from dtssbc.com) The link is incorrect in the unit study and you should be able to access the printable here: The Four Types of Dates. 

Sticky Date Cake

Sticky Date Cake w/Caramel Sauce - We made this last some years ago when we were living overseas, it was wonderful!