Friday 25 June 2010

Banana ice cream

    Too damn busy to think here right now. This post is by way of apology to the several people whose emails I should have replied to or whose blog posts I should have left comments on. I have a busy and mostly-blokeish weekend on the road ahead of me and today the customer for my current piece of software is being especially demanding so adding the general dopiness of  a higher-than-normal girl fog noise floor to the mix means I'm struggling a little to keep on top of everything. Normal service will be resumed...
    Banana ice cream? Last night I created what I considered to be a masterpiece of the art of culinary improvisation. My wife didn't agree, offering the opinion that it looked like baby-puke. To be fair to her, it did resemble something a youngster might have barfed.
    I grew up in a household in which bananas were always slightly over-ripe. My mother was young during the war, so never had bananas for a significant chunk of her formative years. She thus to this day sees a banana as having something of the unimaginable luxury about it, and since the bananas that arrived on these shores post-war were invariably over-ripe, that is how she likes them. As a result I have grown up wanting any bananas I consume to be only just turning yellow, barely ripe at all.
     So what do I do when I have a bunch that goes too far? Perfectly good bananas that haven't been bruised so their flesh is still creamy white, but have blackened skins and are soft and squishy inside. Last night I decided to try to make some banana ice cream. A pretty simple procedure, mashing up the fruit in a bowl and adding some milk (Soya milk in my case) to make something the consistency of a banana porridge. Thereafter all I had to do was put the bowl in the freezer and set my kitchen timer every fifteen minutes so I could bring the bowl out and give it a quick stir before returning it to the freezer.
    My ice cream took nearly three hours of this to be ready. I was rather pleased with the result, it wasn't quite like dairy ice-cream but as a spur-of-the-moment ersatz it was surprisingly credible. My wife didn't quite share my enthusiasm: "We waited THREE HOURS for this?".
    I ate a little too much, gave myself brain-freeze.

6 comments:

  1. Cool, a reason to get the ice cream maker out of retirement this summer...

    Stace

    ReplyDelete
  2. I admit that the thought of banana ice cream does less than little for me, however nice the reality. For moi, it is the banana bread towards which the overripe bananas are ushered. Lovely fragrance when toasted.

    ReplyDelete
  3. An ice-cream-maker is one of those gadgets I've always been tempted by but have never been able to justify by the expectation of using it enough.

    I would have done some banana bread but sadly Mrs. J really dislikes anything with cooked banana in it. The things you find out *after* you say "I do" eh!

    TBH I'm not convinced I'll make banana ice cream again. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

    ReplyDelete
  4. As soon as my bananas turn yellow with just a bit of green left, I put them in the refrigerator. The skins will eventually darken, but the flesh of the fruit will stay firm longer. I love bananas, and anything with bananas in it. Your ice cream sounds delish to me! One of my favorite frozen delicacies is a banana split.

    Melissa XX

    ReplyDelete
  5. A nice exercise in British vocab...

    Let's see..

    I learned the words:

    "Blokeish"

    "Brain-freeze"

    "Baby-puke" (Might have heard this one somewhere)

    "Porridge" (Think I heard this word in a Floyd song)

    I do like my bananas with just a touch of yellow.

    Over and out from Cali...

    ReplyDelete
  6. There is a scene in one of the Austin Powers movies in which Mike Myers and Michael Caine have a conversation that starts in English then descends through Cockney rhyming slang and ends up as acceptable sounding gibberish.

    I'm sure at least one of those I picked up from Mrs. J anyway, and she hails from a lot closer to your part of the world.

    ReplyDelete

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.