Green Banana Stir Fry Side Dish

Green Banana is a popular food eaten with stews, fish, peas, pickled cucumber, cold slaw, and provision such as sweet potato, breadfruit, yam, eddoe and dasheen.
It is not something I eat often because it makes a mess of your pots, and because it really probably isn't a good idea to eat young/unripe bananas. I figure it is a food that came about during the old times when families probably had to make do with what they could find to eat in the garden.

Usually green bananas are boiled in the skin and then the skin removed. the bananas are then dropped into split pea soup or simply eaten with ground provision foods along with meat or peas. This recipe is my personal stir fried way of eating green bananas.

You will need:

A hand of at least 10-15 green/young bananas
4 leaves of greens (2 pakchoi, 2 chard in this recipe)
1 small onion
2 pimento peppers
2 cloves garlic
¼ bell pepper

Seasonings to taste: salt, ground/powdered: turmeric, cumin, ginger, Italian seasoning, paprika, mustard

A little oil

Deep wide pot
flat frying pan or stir fry pan


Method

Bring water to boil in the big wide pot. Separate the green bananas from the hand.

Cut off the top and bottom of each banana. 

Drop them in the boiling water and allow to cook for ten minutes.

Throw them off into a strainer and run cold water to cool them.

When cool, make a shallow slice along the length of each blackened banana skin and peel off the green-black skin. Take the knife and scrape off the thin green pieces that remain on the banana. All must be removed.

When all bananas had been skinned, chop them into bite size pieces.

In the big wide point place oil and chopped onion, pimento, garlic and allow to sautee for a minute. Then add a touch of water, not even enough to cover the bottom of the pan.

Add dashes of all the ground seasonings: salt, mustard, cumin, turmeric, Italian seasoning.

Stir. Add the chopped greens and mix well with the seasoning for a few seconds.

Add the green banana and mix well with the greens for a minute.

Remove from heat. Cool and serve.

Serve it up with fried plantain, avocado, green peas, fried cabbage and love yourself!!

Ila Addis