This morning I directed the teachers in the making of sixteen banana cakes and eight recipes of vanilla icing. I am now sick of banana cake.

We were supposed to make the cakes yesterday at three in the afternoon. In order to make my schedule mesh with theirs, my husband and I skipped work in the morning and instead ran errands in Cobán. Then we came home, unloaded groceries, and ate lunch and then I crashed on the bed for a (failed) nap while he headed in to school. Shortly after he left, I packed up my measuring cups and trekked in to central park where I met the children on their way back from school. We hustled across the market (the rain was coming) to the bus stop and made it to school just in time…to discover that the election for the Señorita and Mister of 2013 (one of the many activities included in these four days of festivities in honor of the school’s anniversary) had run late and they were just now starting the talent show that the teachers had to orchestrate and judge and would I mind working with the seventh grade girls on the cakes?

Um, yeah, as a matter of fact I would because this is the biggest baking to date, it’s late, and they have never baked with me before PLEASE DO NOT DO THIS TO ME. The teachers conferred and then asked if it would be okay if my regular baking students worked with me. I said yes (what option did I have?), so they sent my baking students over to help. However, only two willing souls showed up and the rest were fussy (that’s the Nice Word Version) but I can’t say I blamed them because they were supposed to be partying it up with their friends, not baking. After listening to them moan for a few minutes, I went back to the teachers and suggested that we maybe bake later? When the teachers had time? Like the next day? And they agreed, whew.

So today I showed up at 8:00 and by 8:30 we were up in the kitchen, whipping out cakes at a rapid clip.

Working with adult women, even women who have never baked with me before, was like a dream.

They followed instructions perfectly. They cleaned up after themselves and each other. They were calm. They shared. There was no bickering. There was no fussing.
 
And the cakes turned out perfectly.

(I burned my arm while rearranging the cakes in the oven and Natalia went down to the kitchen to fetch me a tomato. Because apparently tomatoes are soothing for burns? At first it was nice, but then it started to sting so I discretely removed it. I also learned that onion peels are good for wounds because they stop the bleeding. Or so Natalia’s grandmother says.)

But hey, I sat down to write about chocobananos, not banana cake. (Help! Banana cake is taking over my life!)

A little while back our landlord gave us a whole stalk (head?) of bananas. The initial thrill rapidly turned to dismay. What in the world to do with that many bananas?

I facebooked my little problem and got lots of wonderful suggestions. But anything that involved making more food from the existing bananas (like cake or smoothies) was a no-go. I needed a method to get the bananas to disappear lickety split. A greater quantity of food would just slow the process down. Note: after living in banana land for four months, eating them straight up was not a viable option.

Chocobananos—in which you put bananas on a stick, freeze them, and then dip them in chocolate—are hugely popular here. I was all excited to make them, but then I bought a packet of the chocolate coating and it was unspeakably horrible.
 
My one small nibble coated the roof of my mouth, my tongue, and my lips like castor oil and tasted only vaguely of chocolate. But the kids had eaten the bananas at the neighbors’ house and loved them. It was worth a shot, I figured.

Somehow, miraculously, the resulting chocobananos didn’t resemble castor oil slicked frozen fruit. Yes, I could tell they were coated in a chocolate imposter but they were edible. And judging by the kids’ appetites, completely scarfable.

I rolled some of the bananas in chopped peanuts (yum) and others in granola (yum) and in sprinkles (not yum, but the kids loved on those so whatever). We had no trouble finishing off those bananas.

Chocobananos (Chocolate-Covered Bananas)

I have no idea how these would turn out with actual chocolate, so I’m linking up to a few recipes that use the real stuff: Martha Stewart, Epicurious, and Joy of Baking.

Melting chocolate
Bananas
Toppings, optional: chopped peanuts, granola, sprinkles, toffee, crushed pretzels, coconut, etc.
Wooden sticks

Peel the bananas and break in half. Pierce them through the heart via their cut side, lengthwise. Line a cookie sheet with wax paper and place impaled bananas on the paper. Freeze for 30 minutes. (With the kind of chocolate I was using, pre-freezing was optional.)

Melt the chocolate over a double boiler. Dip the frozen banana into the chocolate (or use a spoon to scoop chocolate over). Immediately dip in toppings, if using. Return the chocolate-dipped banana to its wax paper bed and freeze until firm. Eat.

Any leftover chocobananos should be transferred to an airtight container or plastic bag and stored in the freezer.

My mother can get a little obsessive about germs.

When I was growing up, we butchered rabbits, deer, chickens, and beef. She endured my father’s fascination with humanure and the resulting composting toilet in the downstairs bathroom. She fed us raw milk and froze her foraged huckleberries without washing them. She didn’t use a toilet brush to scrub a toilet (*), preferring instead to simply plunge her entire arm into the porcelain bowl and elbow grease off the unmentionables. In other words, my mama’s no wimp.

But cracked eggs, canned green beans, and raw meat—well, these are entirely different issues. Salmonella worries her conscious so much so that if she makes chocolate chip cookies with cracked eggs, she’ll write on the cookie dough’s masking taped label: Made with cracked eggs! Do not eat raw! (My brothers and I snitch the dough and stuff it into our mouths just to hear her shriek.) (Also, when I was little, she dared one of the neighbor girls to eat a raw egg in exchange for a quarter, so I guess she hadn’t yet developed her full-blown, eggy paranoia. )

While she’ll blithely scoop a film of mold that’s sprouted a-top the homecanned applesauce and then cheerily feed it to all her loved ones, she freaks if someone eats a homecanned green bean straight from the jar. “You have to boil it for ten minutes first! To kill the botulism spores!”

And raw meat, well. You ought to see the lengths she goes to. When parceling out the contents of the family-sized styrofoam carton of ground beef after a morning shopping trip, she is careful that all droplets of blood and smears of grease, either real or imaginary, get promptly wiped up. When tossing the soiled packaging into the garbage bucket under the sink, she uses the back of her hands to swipe aside the sink curtain so as to not get any meat germs on the red checkered fabric. She uses her wrists to turn on kitchen spigot. In fact, the whole time she’s working, she holds her soiled hands out in front of her tenderly, carefully, as though they are ticking bombs. And when she’s finished with the meat packing ordeal, she washes and rewashes the knives, cutting board, and counter… all with bleach.

If she saw how the Guatemalan meat vendors handle meat, she’d have an apoplectic fit.

I’ll admit, at first it was a little stomach-turning for me. The hoards of flies. The slinking dogs. The thick iron scent of raw meat that crept out of the open shops and wrapped around the women crouched on the sidewalks with their baskets of fresh cilantro and plums. Buying fresh vegetables in a meat stench fog is ever so slightly gut-wrenching.

But I acclimated. I learned how to not inhale while walking by the baskets of yellow chickens. I steeled my stomach and placed my orders and thought happy thoughts about not dying.

And, wouldn’t you know, I have actually started to luxuriate in the fresh meat options.
 
True, I haven’t branched out from lard, fresh chicken, and ground beef, but hey! I’m buying meat from the butcher shops! And we haven’t died!

 

 

When I ask a butcher for a pound of ground beef, he or she whacks off a chunk of meat, weighs it (in the unwashed scales, oh dear), and then stuffs it into the (unwashed, I’m not watching I’m not watching) meat grinder, and out drops my freshly ground beef into the waiting plastic bag.
 
That the butcher then ties shut with bloody hands and cheerfully hands over to me. I carefully nestle the meaty bag into my shopping bag along with the cabbage, mangoes, and greens that are now getting meat juice all over them.

The bloody hands touching everything still gets me. I try to have exact change so I don’t have to stuff a wad of soiled cash into my wallet—THIS, DEAR CHILDREN, IS WHY WE DO NOT PUT MONEY IN OUR MOUTHS—but no one else thinks twice. At my last butcher shop visit, one of the workers was standing in the doorway, hands glistening red, peacefully munching away on a hunk of cooked beef, yum.

Despite the unsanitary conditions, I actually trust the little shops more than I do the chain grocery store (Walmart). The chicken sold in the stores is a bland white, and it’s shipped in from Guatemala City, they say, though I have a hunch it comes all the way from the states, and probably even from the huge chicken farms that pepper our Virginia community. The other week, our neighbor boys ate  chicken purchased from the store and got violently ill. Since then I’m passionate about avoiding meat of the imported variety (except for bacon) (and hot dogs).

So Mom, wanna come visit? We’ll hit up the meat market together! It’ll be fun!

*I emailed my mother to make sure this was indeed true and she denied it. So I emailed my brothers. One said yes, I was right, and the other one said yes…maybe. My husband says that when we first got married, I pooh-poohed (ha!) his use of the toilet bowl brush because I didn’t grow up using one. So sorry, Mom. I’m standing by my memories.