Bananamania

As a two-person household, we use more than one thousand bananas per year. You read correctly, give and take one bunch, one thousand of these fruits is what we absorb in twelve months. This certainly contributes to keeping "banana republics" alive and well through Latin America, but the real reason behind our conspicuous consumption can be traced to my niece Valérie who showed our daughter a unique way to prepare the fruits, while she was visiting her in the French West Indies. Preparing bananas has become for us a morning ritual that has turned into a true addiction making us go banana… over bananas. Here’s how the process works: You take a rather ripe fruit (brown spots all over are a good sign of maturity) and you crush it inside a desert plate with a fork until it liquefies. No, you can’t do that with an electric blender; you’ve got to crush it with a fork and long enough so chunks disappear and all become fluid and smooth. The sauce obtained should rest for 30 to 45 minutes, until its upper surface turns dark brown and then you finally can appreciate it, rolling your eyes and purring something like: “Ah! So gooooood…” Like with any addiction, the main challenge with this one is checking-out a 20 lbs case of bananas going bad out of the grocery store with all patrons and employees strangely staring at you and asking over and over again: “What are you going to do with ALL these bananas?”