More bananas

Once again, Yupin has made a wonderful, lovely, delicious meal... this one is particularly Isan.  Isan is the Northeast region of Thailand where I am (did you remember that?), and their food is excellent.  Yupin explained to me how the Isan people traditionally have eaten what they can find around them, grow, or raise, and that hasn't really changed much.  Chicken is a staple, as is freshwater fish.  Also, anything that they find in the rice fields- rice, bamboo shoots, beetles, snails- it's all fair game.  By this point, I think I've tried most of it.

Mackerel to the right (a rare saltwater exception) and pickeled bamboo shoots behind that

Earlier today Geoffrey and I harvested some bananas.

Beautiful!

We cut each bunch off of the stalk and put them in cardboard boxes to ripen over the course of the week.  We counted about twelve bunches of about sixteen bananas each- not a bad haul.

It was *this big*

In a previous post, I described harvesting banana flowers- Thais have some use for almost every part of the banana plant.  The flowers can be steamed and eaten and the bananas are eaten as is.  The leaves are used for mats, for making things, and for wrapping around food to help store it.  You can sometimes see bundles of leaves for sale at the market.

You have to be careful around banana trees, though, because the sticky sap will stain anything and everything, permanently and forever.  There's alot of it, too!  So keep that in mind over the course of the week: be careful around banana trees!