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

No bananas?

This Danish study alarmed me as it says what I've always feared someone would say - that bananas aren't that great for you. Nor grapes.

The authors claim it pretty well settles the question of which diet to use to lose weight - low-carb, low fat and high protein. That seems to have sense, but what about fish - which surely is quite heavy in fish fat? I rely on bananas for my five-a-day, I find Golden Delicious apples increasingly unpalatable and probably rather more expensive than cheap bananas.

The conclusions of the Danish study are interesting but I'm not sure it settles the question of diet. For a start it involved barely a thousand families. I am certainly still stepping up my consumption of fish. I've just discovered the joy of grilled sardines. The grill helps to heat the house on a cold day and they make a reasonable quick snack for lunch or a light dinner.

And the good news is that my left arm has all but healed - no doubt thanks to grilled sardines. It has taken weeks but now it is no more than a little stiff - and it is getting better not worse in spite of Britain's icy weather. It's been a slow process and that's my excuse for only posting once before in November.

RAS