Baking Bananas

I once had a boyfriend who took me on a picnic at the banks of the Charles River.  He had cooked a special gourmet dinner - sole with sauteed bananas.  Hmmm.  It tasted the way it sounds - weird.

I have, on the other hand, encountered fried bananas at Chinese restaurants as a yummy, gooey dessert, and I am sure they would be good flambeed over ice cream, or in any number of ways.  I like them with cottage cheese, or in cereal.  I guess I have  pedestrian tastebuds.  Oh - and if they are very ripe, I like them frozen.  When you slice them and eat them, it is like banana ice cream.  Sauteed with sole - somehow doesn't do it for me.

Twice this week I have made baked bananas.  Here is my recipe:

Ingredients:
one banana (preferably in plastic bag)
one car
hot weather

Place banana in plastic bag, and place it in the trunk of your car on a day when it is 90 degrees and sunny.  Leave the car for several hours. When you return, much of the skin will have turned black, and the banana will be pulpy and icky inside.  Take into house and throw out.  Or, leave it on the kitchen table for a day or so thinking that maybe the part where the skin didn't turn black might be edible.  Pick up the banana to peel it and try out this theory, feel how disgustingly mushy the inside is, and then throw it out.

Variation:
Place banana in plastic bag, and place it on the passenger's seat of your car on a day when it is 90 degrees and sunny.  Leave the car for several hours.  Return to the fragrant aroma of a banana cooked to a pulp inside its skin by the sun.  Take into house and throw out immediately, having learned from the first method that it will be inedible.

I sacrificed two organic bananas for this inadvertent culinary discovery.  Read and learn.