Banana vending machine

Last week I went to Tokyo for work, and saw a machine selling bananas.

Cuban food

Sangria, Daiquiri, and Daiquiri Japon

Mojito

Last week I had dinner with the nurses that I met in Paris that turned out to work at the same university as me. We had Cuban food, and it was great. I had been to this place 7 years ago, with a Dominican friend who said the food tasted similar to what she was used to at home. The menu had not change much as far as I could tell, and there were many nice things to choose from.

The nurses found a coupon that got us some free fried bananas.

We had lots of food, lots of rum, and lots of fun stories. They like to travel, and I travel a lot for work, so we had many stories to share about things that happen abroad and things that are very different from how they are in Japan.

Banana experiments

I found a recipe on Google+ that said something along the lines of "healthy pancakes". Taking a quick look at the ingredients, it said: "One banana, two eggs". And nothing else.  I though that using only a banana and two eggs, there is no way you will be able to make pancakes.

The next day, I happened to walk past a place selling bananas and eggs cheaply after I had left a pair of trousers with an old woman for repair service. I decided to buy some bananas and eggs and try this pancake recipe out.

After mashing the bananas with a fork and adding the eggs, I poured some of the batter into a frying pan and after about a minute or so of frying this, it did indeed look quite a lot like a pancake. The consistency of the food was also quite pancake-like. It was quite a lot harder to flip this banana pancake than flipping a normal pancake, since the banana parts tended to lump up and make some parts extra heavy and the pancake itself was a bit soft.

While this thing did look quite a lot like a pancake, it did not taste like a pancake. It tastes like a banana you have warmed up. If someone said: "This is a banana pancake", I would think: "OK, that is a reasonable expression to use". If someone said: "This is a pancake", I would think: "No, it is not". It was pretty good, and I guess fairly healthy.

After eating all the eggs and bananas over a few days and finally being able to turn off my refrigerator again (in Japan it is cheaper to eat at restaurants than to cook, if like me you eat alone, so I do not cook very often any more). Then, one or two days after I finished off the last of the huge pile of bananas I had bought, Google+ once again suggested a recipe for me: banana cookies.

The ingredients are: "one banana, half a cup of oat meal". I happened to have some Swedish oat meal left at home, but no bananas, and thinking "Can you really make something like cookies using only a banana and oat meal?" I went to the 24h open super market at 2 a.m. and bought some more bananas... Oat meal is usually not sold in Japan, unless you go to special import stores where they sell American things very expensively, but the small amount I had left would be enough.

Again, I mashed up a banana and mixed it with oat meals. Then I tried to bake cookies in my Japanese "oven". Japanese ovens do not get very warm, and they are tiny. The result was something that looked a bit like cookies, and tasted like warm bananas. Adding chocolate chips, nuts, or raisins might make these more interesting. Using only bananas and oat meal, the result was not that great.