On my last day in Singapore, a friend and I went shopping at.. well, it'd be the equivalent of a farmers' market in the US, I suppose, except this one was year-round and had permanent stalls.. anyways, we went shopping because we were going to make dinner (as it turned out, for a bunch of guys, how distressingly retro - girls in the kitchen cooking [and drinking], boys in the living room talking business. YES THIS DID HAPPEN).
Pictured above is a banana blossom. A banana what, you ask? A banana blossom. Apparently it grows on the stem holding a cluster of bananas. No, I didn't know that they existed either, but apparently they're a big thing to eat in SE Asia. In the picture we've peeled back one of the leaves so you can see baby bananas to be (at least, that's what we guessed they were). So my friend decided that she wanted to make a banana blossom salad to start our dinner.
This is the recipe we intended to use. Go ahead and check it out. It seems rather simple, n'est-ce pas? I mean, chop up some banana blossoms, toss it with a simple lime-sugar vinaigrette, and presto, you have banana blossom salad. Nice and easy. Just like that. A Vietnamese recipe my mom makes often is very similar, except she uses napa cabbage instead of banana blossoms. It was going to be tasty.
What the recipe did NOT warn us about was that when slicing into the banana blossoms, they started oozing this sticky blackish sap. It was gross. It turned the water we were to toss the sliced blossoms into a vague inky color. (Forget julienning it on the mandolin, the sap got everywhere.) It was NOT removable with water alone. SOAP didn't even cut through the sap. (Eventually, we turned to vegetable oil, and that did the trick). Plus, the cut blossoms didn't emit the most pleasant of aromas, and when we tasted the blossoms, they sort of tasted like... well, chopped up banana peel, with the texture of that as well.
We couldn't serve this, we decided. Not even to a group of hungry guys who were just happy to get a homemade meal that they didn't have to prepare themselves. So out the banana blossoms went, and we had to figure out another starter (oooooh suspense, I'm going to write about it in a later post).
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