Salvage

With an excavation expedition comes a cooking story - it has to! Right?

We were in Lake City with about 16 students for field school. Actually, we were about 30 miles in the middle of nowhere outside of Lake City.

We had a wonderful cook. She not only cooked she made the long trip into town to do the shopping.

The local grocery store had a special on bananas so she bought a ton of them.

We put them in our lunch bags – great for mid day snack or just as a treat for lunch. But we were not eating them fast enough and they were going brown/black then everyone ignored them.

She made banana bread but there were still a lot left and she was in the process of tossing them when I asked her if I could have a few.

“Sure but they are rotten.”

I grabbed a frying pan, a lump of butter (margarine doesn’t work) and proceded to peel the bananas, slice them in half lengthwise and fry them out.

This was after dinner and the students were playing board games but one came over to see what I was doing.

In my opinion, curiosity is the mark of a good student!

“Hmm-that smells good. May I try some?”

When really ripe bananas are fried out in butter they candy/carmelize and are delicious over ice cream!

“Oh! This is wonderful,” she said as she scooped fried banana with the attendant brown syrup and ice cream into her mouth.

Her ohs and ahs immediately caught the attention of the rest of the board players! They left their games to see what we were doing.

We cooked up more bananas - cooked until all the bananas were gone! No one had ever had this treat before they said.

We had this treat several more times during the excavation.

And no banana went wasted again!