Caramelized Bananas

A few years ago Bryan and I met up with one of Bryan's business contacts for lunch at Fogo de Chao in Philadelphia.  The place is like a festival of meat where the gauchos come to your table with different meats and you tell them what you'd like and they carve it off for you.  The food is very good and it's very easy to overeat there when surrounded with so many delicious meats.

As much as I love the meats there, there is a side dish that I love just as much as the meat.  That side dish is the caramelized banana.  It has that out of this world yummy quality that leaves me wondering if I should go for another round of filet mignon, parmesan encrusted pork or more caramelized bananas.  In those moments the struggle is very real.  There's only so much food I can eat at a time.

I'm not sure why, but I never tried making the caramelized bananas at home.  I suppose I thought it would just be too complicated.  Yesterday while at my sister-in-law's house for a graduation party her boyfriend's family was there cooking some out of this world food. His family is from Barbados and these people are just gifted with making some fabulous food.  While I was happily eating some rice and beans and bacon wrapped dates, a plate of what looked a lot like caramelized bananas appeared on the table.  Turns out they were plantains, but they tasted just as awesome as the bananas from Fogo.  The plantains inspired me to try making the caramelized bananas so I went in search of a recipe.

I found this recipe from Food Network and gave it a go.  The results were very yummy.  They turned out so well that after bringing some to Bryan while he was in a meeting, he came upstairs shortly after asking who made them.  They really only take a little bit of time to prepare, so I'll certainly be making them again.  I wish I had taken a picture so I could show you  how they looked.  You don't need to serve them over ice cream like they tell you in the recipe.  They're very good all by themselves.

Who Doesn't Like Pancakes?

We're trying once again to limit our eating out and take-out habit.  We save so much money when we limit eating out to once a week, so we're doing our best to start cooking the vast majority of our meals.  When I was pregnant with Katie and unable to be anywhere near chicken without feeling horribly nauseated we had a really good run of eating most of our meals at home that entire summer.  We limited eating out to only a few times a month and the amount of money we saved by doing so was a real eye opener.  Not to mention it helped us save enough money to take care of a few home improvements that we needed to do at the time.

I'm finding we do our best with eating at home when we have some sort of menu for the week written down.  Otherwise Bryan and I go back and forth trying to figure out what we should eat and we usually wind up ordering take-out instead.  We've also found that it helps to have some back up dinner ideas in case the original plan falls through such as a traffic delay, or the store not having what we wanted in stock or of acceptable freshness.  The lack of a back up plan has been a problem on more than a few occasions and it doesn't help that our awesome full size freezer is mostly stocked with bags of ice and lots of little bags of milk for Katie, most of which needs to be discarded.

I made pancakes for dinner tonight and they're always a hit with Oscar and Katie.  Madeline and Ellie run hot and cold with them, and Bryan needs to be in the mood for them.  I'm in the same camp as Oscar and Katie.  I could eat them every day.  The look I got from Bryan when I suggested that we have pancakes three times a week like we used to when we had just gotten married was priceless.  He claims I beat pancakes and ravioli to death back then.  I disagree.  There's no such thing as too much pancakes.  It's just not possible.  You can eat them with jelly, fresh fruit, chocolate chips and whipped cream, maple syrup (it has to be real, not the fake stuff) and whipped butter, or just plain.  It's impossible to go wrong with pancakes.