Bananas

Why is it that the bananas in the house are either barely yellow, completely eaten before I can get one, or have expanding black spots?

Sigh.

Peanut and Pumpkin love them.  Bananas are healthy¹, and don’t require a knife, making them a favourite “I do myseff” snack when the children were younger.  As long as someone started them, of course.

A few years ago, one of my colleagues told me he switched his peeling from the top-of-the-stem-down method to the flower-end-up method after watching primates in a zoo.  He watched as a mother chimp (or baboon, I don’t remember exactly which of the smaller primates it was) showed her young one how to peel a banana.  He said the mother started with the bottom end; her young one imitated, and was successful.

So my colleague tried it.  Sure enough, he was able to successfully peel the bananas without the smushing that happens when you start at the top.

But that doesn’t help with the browning bananas on my counter.

Some of them will be peeled and tossed into the freezer once I’ve posted this.  Two of them are going into muffins for tomorrow’s breakfast.  Which means there will be a weekend post, maybe even with pictures and a recipe.  That should make up for the lateness of today’s post.

They are definitely outside the 100-mile diet.  Unless I make friends with an experienced gardener who has a palatial greenhouse, they are going to be trucked in.  I’m OK with that.  We can’t get locally grown coffee, either. 

1 - Healthy – According to canadianliving.com (I got very frustrated trying to find this info on the Health Canada site, so went to a magazine instead.  Sorry.), bananas have 3grams of fiber, and are a source of vitamin B6, potassium and folate.  The article also says bananas have more potassium than most fruit.