banana

Banana Lumpia

Well, my friends, I have one more Filipino dish to share with you that didn’t make it into Filipino Food Month. It’s your bonus recipe– totally free! This is one of my very favorite things to eat. This is a dessert version of lumpia, and it is seriously tasty. I remember rushing to the student store at my school at lunch or merienda whenever these were fresh and buying them for 5 pesos (about $0.12) each.

In the Philippines, banana lumpia is made with a cooking banana, called saba. I have never seen saba here in Minnesota, so I struggled for a while to figure out what to make these with. Saba bananas are short and squat, and are starchier than regular bananas, but not as starchy as plantains.

I had tried making these with plantains before, and the plantains were too firm and stayed very separate from the rest of it. Then I tried regular bananas, but they just got mushy with the frying. I decided to try one more thing, and it worked quite well!

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PB ‘N B French Toast Redux

Ok, friends. This is not a new recipe. In fact, this is the first recipe I ever posted on this blog. And it’s a goodie.

But here’s the thing. The first time I made it for you, Little Man was less than 2 months old. Which meant that I didn’t have a ton of time for these things, and that most of my cooking happened after he went to bed (i.e. after it was dark.) So the pictures I posted were terrible. That didn’t stop many of you from leaving lovely comments on how delicious it sounded. But it’s bugged me for a long time.

So, recently I made this again and decided to take pictures of the process. This time I made it for breakfast, so natural light was plentiful. I left the directions mostly the same, but this time we made 4 sandwiches instead of 3, since Little Man loves himself some french toast.

To review, the PB N B in the title stands for Peanut Butter, Nutella & Banana.  In french toast. It’s pretty much all kinds of awesome. I mean, seriously. How can you go wrong with that combo?  This isn’t so much a recipe as an idea.  I don’t follow a recipe when I make french toast, so if you have a favorite recipe, you can easily use it when making this. (more…)