Had a surfeit of bananas the other day, but in my enfeebled state, I wasn’t up to the commitment required to make a loaf of banana bread.
Instead I thought I’d try a comfort food I remember from childhood – baked bananas. This involves wrapping your banana in tin foil with a sprinkling of brown sugar and putting it in the oven. Simple and delicious. Trouble was, I knew there was a third ingredient that I couldn’t remember. Was it butter? Or some sort of liquid? A juice? In the end I put it to the family chat. None of my siblings could remember but we came to a consensus that it was likely to be lemon juice.
I was saving my lemon for a medicinal lemon and honey drink later, so I plumped for a tablespoon of lime juice, of which I have plenty as previously noted. I prepared my treat as directed and went off to watch an old Cary Grant movie, the cerebral equivalent of comfort eating.
It wasn’t until I smelled smoke that I was alerted to the fact that something wasn’t right. Somehow, one small banana had produced a volcano, and the lava had burst forth, fallen to the bottom of (my husband’s beloved and expensive) oven, forming a congealed black limpet like mass. It took me an hour to chip the charcoal off, and even then there is a large residue that stubbornly remains. All was not lost, however – there was a sad, leathery, much diminished banana remnant left behind in the tin foil which was “edible” in so far that it didn’t kill me to eat it, but it tasted pretty awful, even with two scoops of the best Duck Island peanut butter ice cream. And, the smoke alarm never went off, so there’s that.
Today I discovered from my sister – not part of the original discussions, sadly – that the mysterious third ingredient was actually cinnamon.
