We're going bananas

Today was a funny day at Generous Servings. I think the stress is starting to get to us. First, Jill decided her legs were too tired to walk around the kitchen, so she brought in our new desk chair and rolled around while doing other jobs.

And then this happened--see if you can find Travis in this picture:

What's going on here is that we looked out our window and spotted someone from our traumatic past going into the bank across the street. There was a woman with him, who came over to spy on us, pretending to look at our class calendar in the window. Jill and I ran into the other room and Travis ducked down just in time, as she came up to the window. Then she came into the cafe to "pick up a copy of our class schedule", which really means case the joint, and Jill and I went into hiding and made Travis go out there. Good times.

Finally, I tried a recipe for sugar-roasted bananas that I saw on a molecular gastronomy site. It seemed easy enough: encase peeled bananas in a sugar-egg white crust and bake for an hour. I thought it might make a cool start to a twist on banana splits. I got two bananas, pressed the sugar crust around them, and it all looked fine going into the oven, but here's what came out:

Whoa. All that foamy stuff is solid, by the way--like a cross between styrofoam and coral, but really banana-y. And the bananas themselves exploded out of the shells. I didn't think bananas were capable of such drama--they usually seem so staid and boring. I might expect this kind of behavior from a loud-mouth mango or a flashy pomegranate, but not a banana. Sure, bananas self-digest fairly impressively, but there's just not a lot of excitement in something that changes from "cottony" to "mushy". So this roasting catastrophe was shocking. I don't know if it was due to the high altitude or what, but it was gross. That is not going to make it onto the menu.

The good news is, we are very close to perfecting a great buttermilk panna cotta (which we're going to serve with rosemary-Framboise reduction, which is about the tastiest sauce in the universe), so at least no one is going to starve around here.