Going Bananas

The other day I gave in to the desire to eat pisang goreng (Malaysian banana fritters). There is a little stall opposite the Jusco side of Pearl Point where a lady, who looks like an illustration from a Russian fairy tale in her long sleeved long gown and scarf, sells various fritters (sweet potato too). The stall is decorated with several kinds of bananas.

However she is not per se a banana seller and so she was rather taken aback when I asked to buy one large banana.

After I had sufficiently wooed her and overcome her horror at my request, I also made so bold as to ask for 1RM worth of the sweetest variety.

The batch of pisang goreng that I bought was pretty good -sweet which is rather the exception here as I suppose the real sweet tooth lives only in India and the rest of the world can be wimpish when it comes to the sugar quotient of a dessert.

Now I must tell you that we have such a dish in India (Kerala) where it is called pazham pori (The recipes given online all contain sugar but that is not the way my sister-in-law made it so far as I remember. It was her preparation that I first tasted).

Growing up in South India, especially in Pondicherry, I was exposed to so many varieties of bananas. Alas! We were not so well off and I was too small to make my desires well known and so I did not, then, get the chance to taste the amazing range that I could see being sold on the roadsides.

And then I grew up and married a man from Kerala, the real place for going bananas in India. It is thus that I encountered the custom of having steamed banana for breakfast. The type of banana used for this is gigantic. This is chopped into large pieces and steamed in its skin and then eaten with Kerala poppadoms.

It is an amazing dish and, in our case, we added some carrot chutney as side dish to spice up things.

Below, a cute look at how it's made!