Baked well tart

Much classic cooking is simply about creating different textures and combinations from basic ingredients such as flour, eggs, milk and water.

So we set about making a salicylate-free equivalent of the Bakewell Tart. And it worked.

Actually my other half did the work. I'm told this is what you do.

Partly cook a thin layer of pastry on the bottom of a baking pan.

Lay sliced Golden Delicious apple on top - and then plain cake mixture on top of that.

Bake.

Delicious!

It's not quite as jammy as proper Bakewell tart. We need some ideas. Perhaps prepare the apple beforehand and add some sugar?

* Talking of apple, we bought some cut-price green apples from Asda's. I was wondering why I had symptoms today - itching in various places and a strange bleed on the lip tonight. Then I realised that although they looked like Golden Delicious there was no guarantee they were. They tasted a little stronger than GD. They were probably something else such as Granny Smith.

I tend to live with mild symptoms without complaining - but maybe I should make more effort to identify what is causing them.

RAS

Cheap bananas

A few weeks ago I bought a big bag of market-price bananas from Tesco's. If you're lucky with these bananas they are edible. If you're unlucky they go off fast or fail to ripen properly. For a few pence, it's hit and miss.

These were large bananas and apparently just about ripe and at first quite edible. We put them in the fridge, where the skin turned brown but the inside stayed white.

Usable bananas are usually quite expensive and that's put me off experimenting with them. This was different. As time went by the flavour changed - they began to taste like the banana you get in tinned fruit salad, so far as I can recall tinned fruit salad. Not especially pleasant to eat raw.

I've tried cooking with bananas before. This time I fried up a mix of banana, golden delicious and tuna, with a little cabbage - then adding soy sauce for more flavour. I ate it with spaghetti. It was delicious, and, surprisingly, it tasted like curry. So maybe it would be even better with rice. I wonder how I can make it even more like curry. There is still the outstanding mystery of why tandoori appears on the diet list.

I used one for a banana split meal - with ice cream and cream. You could add chocolate sauce as well, I suppose.

After nearly two weeks, we used the last few bananas to make banana cake. Delicious and it lasted for a long time.

Now I wonder about fruit salad. I could make it with banana, golden delicious apple and green grapes. But I wonder where the juice would come from. Commercial salads often use a syrup - but the better quality ones use a fruit juice. Does anyone know how you could make a juice? I am thinking of a fruit salad with ice cream and cream. I am thinking and salivating.

RAS