Showing posts with label smoothies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label smoothies. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Too many bananas


We're on our second huge bunch of bananas in a month all ripening at the same time. When I say "bunch" BTW, I don't mean a "hand" of 6-8 bananas, like you might purchase at the grocery store. I mean a whole banana plant's bounty, many hands on a stem, in the neighborhood of probably 30 pounds or so of fruit, 60-80 bananas at a time.

There's only one thing to do: freeze 'em. I've been peeling and cutting up bananas onto parchment-paper lined cookie sheets for 3 days now.

Once the banana chunks are frozen I peel them off the paper and put them in large ziplock bags, back in the freezer. Freezing them on a sheet first, like this, may seem an unnecessary step, but it's not. If you just cut up your bananas and put a whole lot of them in a ziplock bag in the freezer, they'll freeze up in a one big lump. Good luck prying off a handful to put in the blender. Pre-freezing is easier in the long run. The chunks do still cohere a little bit, but not so much you can't retrieve however many you might want.

These will keep us in smoothies for a good long time. Fortunately, we consume a lot of smoothies around here. I add some frozen berries, a scoop of protein powder, and some plain yogurt (and water) to the bananas in mine. If I'm feeling a need to be ultra-healthy I add some ground flax seeds, too, but just as often I forget.