Tag: recipe

What to do with too many bananas

Bunch of bananas on a table
15 kg of Ladyfingers, just picked

We love our home-grown bananas but a large bunch can be challenging. A big bunch might be 15 or even 20 kilos, up to two hundred bananas, and the time between the first fruit being ripe enough and the last being too overripe to eat isn’t much over a week. What can you do with them?

We’ve been working on answers for a few years. Cakes, breads and slices are my main focus here because I’ve been collecting recipes and experimenting with them recently, but I will briefly cover other options at the end.    Continue reading “What to do with too many bananas”

Moving towards a plant-based diet

In Eating for the Planet (two years ago) I argued that the ideal diet is “one which minimises harm to the environment and to animals while maximising benefits to our health. There is no logically necessary connection between the three objectives but there is a ‘sweet spot’ where all three happen to coincide: a plant-based diet emphasising fresh, local, seasonal food.”

carbon footprint of meats and other protein
Environmental footprints of various proteins, from the Environmental Working Group, UK.

Since then, calls for all of us to adopt a plant-based diet for the sake of the environment have become ever more frequent and more urgent. Not entirely coincidentally, I have been moving towards such a diet myself, and thinking about how to do so as easily as possible. After all, if a change seems worthwhile and isn’t too hard, then more of us will try it.

Changing the lifetime habits of a household all at once may be impossible but what if we can gently move in the right direction – one dish at a time, one meal at a time, and maybe have some fun doing so? Continue reading “Moving towards a plant-based diet”