Platanos!!

Yucatan Today has an article about bananas! You can read it here. The range and variety of bananas really is incredible. We eat the tabasco or rotan bananas almost every day. Since fruit ripens so very fast here, we usually only buy a small hand (bananas come in hands!) of bananas, but the tienda that our neighbor's have across the street almost always has bananas for sale.

I already blogged about my love for platanos machos when made into tostones. But you can also use them like you do potatoes, in stews. A favorite meal in our house is carne guisado con platanos. I have decided that guisado means "stewed", you see cocina economicas offering 3 guisos, which means 3 entrees, but things that are guisado seem to always have some sort of sauce in which they were simmered or stewed.

Another way we also like machos is baked with rum and sugar, yum.

Then there are the lovely little bananas, cute and delicious, there are ones whose skins look reddish and others that just look like mini-rotans.

I have 3 banana plants, they were free from the Palm nursery when I bought the Phoenix roebelini (pygmy date palm) , they are supposed to be 2 "regular" bananas and 1 macho, since it takes 18 to 24 months for bananas to bear fruit, it will be awhile before I find out. The high winds that we have been having have totally shredded the leaves, rendering them useless for cooking purposes (sigh). Oh, here is an online nursery that sells banana plants so you can get an idea of the diversity of the fruit.
Oh, I was surfing the net, reading cooking blogs and I found this recipe for Banana Stuffed French Toast, I had some left over rolls and of course some bananas, so I made it, I used more eggs since I had them. Since I was using rolls instead of a loaf of french bread, I also removed most of the crust which I then fed to the doves outside. We ate it with mermelada de naranja agrida, yum! so good!