We eat a lot of bananas. Most food here is seasonal and we have no imports, so during pineapple season we get almost one a day but since mid-January, I’ve seen exactly one pineapple. Bananas are not seasonal. Bananas grow all the time. There are always bananas.

I never knew that bananas came in so many forms, but it turns out they do. I’ve never disliked bananas. I’ve never be overwhelmingly fond of them either. They were useful to toss in a smoothie or if the smoothie didn’t happen for a few days, they made good bread. I think I will go on an anti-banana diet for a few years when I get home, just to try to balance out the amount of bananas in my life.

To deal with this quantity of bananas, I have been forced to become creative in my approach to cooking. It turns out that slightly green bananas make a good curry and the really green bananas are more like a potato than you would think possible. This includes the possibility of being boiled and mashed with garlic.

I’ve started making banana bread. I make a lot of banana bread. I make banana bread probably four times a week. We have that many bananas.

The current recipe is: a pile of self-rising flour, a dash of cinnamon, a smaller pile of sugar, two to five ripe bananas depending on size, and the milk of one coconut. If the bananas aren’t really ripe, they are just kind of ripe, it works best to scratch them with a fork to make mush. The squeezing method just isn’t as effective on the barely ripe ones. I get a good fire going, usually same one I cooked my dinner of banana curry on, and stack on a few stones. When the fire is starting to die out and the stones are good and hot, I dig a hole in the embers and nestle the pot into it. Then I cover it up with hot stones and coconut husks. The bread turns out the best if I stoke the fire a few times during baking. That lesson has been slow to learn, but I’m catching on now.

Today, I made three loaves of banana bread. It takes about an hour to bake each one and probably half an hour of prep time. I made them to sell to the community as a fundraiser for the Aid Post. This afternoon, my papa stopped by to see how the baking was going. I cut the loaf into eight pieces. He ate five of them. I think I may have found a good money maker for the Aid Post. I might not tell anyone how to make it until the Aid Post has made all the money it needs.