THE FIRST SIMPLE COLOMBIAN RECIPE - FRIED BANANAS. AND A LITTLE ABOUT THE HISTORY OF BANANAS

Those who have read my Instagram posts before and perhaps have already started visiting the site have probably noticed that I have different topics intersecting with each other. Almost always, one is connected with another. Just like the banana history of my life.

As a child, I remember, bananas were a novelty. I still remember the Soviet Union. My mother brought them from somewhere. I ate them as a delicacy. By the way, for some reason I remember my childhood better than the years that followed. It's good that I remember many people. They recall events associated with me for me.

Fortunately, this time, although partially, the memories have been preserved. Or rather, the memories of living in the Canary Islands. If you want, I can write about them in more detail later? Well, at worst, I'll ask a friend from there to remind me. Men generally have better memories. I don't understand how they store such volumes of information.

Anyway, in the Canary Islands I lived with a girl who often cooked fried bananas. Guess what country she was from. She spoke Spanish, but not like the Canarians. By the way, I understood her much better. She told me that she came to Spain to earn money. And after some time she would return to her homeland and buy an apartment. She helped some Spanish lady with the housework. And it was she who taught me how to properly fry bananas. I don't remember what the essence of correctness was. Because my current neighbor just takes and fries in vegetable oil. Then sprinkles with salt. The latter is not for me. I like everything sweet. Well, so you have already guessed that the girl I lived with in Spain, ironically, was also Colombian?

I really liked the taste and such an unexpected decision for me at that time. I have never tried fried bananas before. But these bananas are not the usual for us yellow ones and are often already soft. And these are green bananas (plátanos verdes). However, there are many varieties and types of bananas, but they are mainly divided into two main groups: dessert (sweet) and food (also known as the plátanos group). For a long time, I divided bananas into my three categories: unripe, ripe, and overripe)))).

At first, I was surprised why there were so many green bananas in their supermarkets, which were completely unfit for consumption. I'm talking about the Canaries now, but it's the same in Colombia. It turned out that this is how it should be. They have a different purpose. Oh, my memory is returning. I remember how I once tried to eat a green banana out of hunger. Either I was too lazy to go to the store, or everything was already closed. Here my memory fails me again. But I clearly remember that the Canary Islands are not for me. The islands themselves are beautiful. The climate is wonderful. But everything there is always closed.

On weekends and holidays, nothing works. I was surprised that even supermarkets were closed on Sunday, with the exception of one for tourists. And even then, it closed early. Well, in general, this is a common situation for Europe as a whole. I DON'T like it. It stresses me out.

So now I'm eating these platonos verdes in Colombia. In my opinion, they taste no different from the Spanish ones. But you can buy them at any time of the day. ))))

To be fair, I was, of course, curious about how we cook fried bananas. From the recommendations: greenish bananas, in the simplest recipes: cut lengthwise.

So funny, I showed Julia this photo. She immediately objected, these are not green, but yellow bananas. But we don't have green ones like that, do we? Well, or they don't lie in piles separately specifically for this purpose. As a result of the discussions, it turned out that here, too, they cook yellow ones, if you want them, and they cut them not only into circles, but also like in the photo.

And here are our latest.

Everything that Julita cooks is delicious. I like Colombian cuisine. I have not figured out concerning the soups yet. I ate at a restaurant once. But I didn’t really like it, to be honest. I need to try it again. I have so much work that I don’t really have time to eat. I always prefer sleep to food. Especially in the morning. Today, the caballero under the window shouted “avocados, avocados” so loudly that he woke me up. And I couldn’t fall back to sleep. It’s been a hard day. A very hard day. As my grannies used to say: sleep is more valuable than money. (Although they themselves got up at half past four in the morning their whole lives). But that’s a completely different story.

In the meantime, a few words about the banana history in our countries. The "career" of bananas went uphill in the middle of the 20th century: according to the memoirs of the People's Commissar for Foreign Trade Anastas Mikoyan, Stalin appreciated the fruit and after 1945 personally ordered the purchase of small batches of bananas to supply central stores in the largest cities of the USSR.

The first suppliers of bananas for Soviet citizens were China and Vietnam, and the government did not spend a penny on the purchase - Soviet loans and military aid were "paid" with fruit.

After the border conflict on Damansky Island, the Soviet Union found itself deprived of cheap "socialist" bananas, the government had to sanction the purchase of bananas in the traditional "banana republics" of Latin America. Thus, the years of stagnation turned out to be a period of continuous growth in banana imports, mainly from Colombia and Ecuador. So who knows, maybe I remember the Colombian bananas of my childhood.

Unfortunately, I could not find information about which country was the first to come up with the idea of ​​frying bananas. If anyone knows, please share. That's all I have for today! More to come!