Bonus Material - Recipes

Baked Bananas: For desserts or for salsa

You can bake bananas in their skin! I found this recipe in The Great Salsa Book (10 Speed Press). This really is a great cookbook (a boring but accurate name) with 100 salsa recipes and suggested pairings for each one.

Roasted Banana Salsa
4 ripe bananas
1 teaspoon dark rum
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon maple syrup
12 macadamia nuts, finely chopped
Preheat oven to 350 degrees, put the bananas on a cookie sheet or in a baking dish and stick them in the oven for 30 minutes. The skins turn dark brown (almost black) when they are done. Let cool. Peel, dice, place in a mixing bowl and fold in remaining ingredients. Serve with duck or pork. (I had it for breakfast one morning, sans rum, of course, and I left out the maple syrup without missing it.)

The bananas cool pretty quickly, and you can use a sharp knife to cut the skin and pour the tasty filling out. There is a lot of juice that comes out with the still-intact and solid banana, so hold them over a bowl when cutting the skin. Cooked fruit is more easily digested than raw fruit, so this baking tip is especially good for babies and toddlers, though most adults could benefit from giving their digestive systems a break, too.

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