an excess of melons...

...has led me to making melon bread. Right now I have a lot of musk melons and white honeydew and orange honeydew. I have frozen some in chunks for eating in winter (when it will taste sooooo good), but yesterday I tried something new. Well new to me anyway. I have a friend that uses melon purees a lot like this apparently.

Melon Bread

Mix
3 eggs beaten
1/2 c turbinado (or more if your melons aren't as sweet)
1 Tbsp vanilla extract

stir in
3 cups melon puree

Sift together
3 c whole wheat pastry flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp baking powder
2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 ground ginger

Then add dry ingredients to wet ingredients just until moistened. Stir in
1 c chopped nuts (I used pecans)

Pour into 2 prepared 8x4 pans. Bake at 325 for 50-60 minutes.

Next time I make this, I think I will add a couple Tbsp of flax meal too. Trey called this bread "absolute yumminess" and he is my least carb/bread inclined child. It has a different flavor that is hard to describe. But we really liked it here!

I was looking online for recipes and saw where someone had replaced the oil in their recipe with some extra melon. Then I thought about how sweet our melons are and realized that I could add much less sugar than the recipes I was looking at called for. That led me to think about using melon puree in all kinds of recipes just as added sweetener. Like you would use applesauce I guess, but this adds sweet as well as the moisture. Personally I have nothing against things being sweet. I'm not militant about no sweets. Quite the opposite in fact. But I do like to use natural sweeteners whenever possible. And I like that this also adds a healthy dose of vitamin C and vitamin A (for the orange melons) and a host of other nutrients I probably don't even know about.

Somebody try this and let me know what you think!!!