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

Tandoori and curry

In my search to make salicylate-free curry, I recently tried to find tandoori spice in our local supermarket, which serves an ethnically mixed population. No luck!

Finally last night I found myself in curry house eating with friends. My main course was chicken and chips, no spice, no curry. And I had forgotten to take any montelukast.

When it came to starters there were a number of tandoori choices. Time to give it a go, I thought. So I selected tandoori king prawns. Only two came on the plate. They were okay but pretty insubstantial..

No obvious or immediate consequences. We've had cold viruses around all week and I may have one. As always it's impossible to tell except by measuring The Splodge, which has been quite pale. So that may have helped prevent reactions.

Was it my imagination or were my lips strangely blue last night? I've just checked again and now they are red - they were definitely oddly blue last night.

I've now checked Wikipedia, which is the fount of all knowledge, and it turns out that "Tandoori" is not a specific spice at all. It is a method of cooking.

So what on earth is "tandori spice powder" (sic) doing on my diet list? Wikipedia goes on to explain that tandoori chicken is marinated in  "garam masala, garlic, ginger, cumin, cayenne pepper, and other spices depending on the recipe. Cayenne, red chili powder, or other spices give the typical red color. Turmeric produces a yellow-orange color."

Presumably at some point a biochemist picked up a vial containing something called "tandori spice powder". But what was in it?

No wonder my lips turned blue and I spent half the night in the bathroom.

This is all very sad -  as it seems to put paid to my hopes of ever eating curry again.

RAS