Thursday, August 28, 2003

I'm finally impressed

I didn't really think it could happen but an item of Filipino-unique foods has gone beyond the call of duty in impressing me.

At PriceSmart I bought a bunch of latundan bananas. A variety of banana that grows specifically in the Philippines. On-line they are described as small and sweet. Each is the perfect size for the kids and will fit easily in lunchboxes. After dinner last night, Katherine grabbed 2 for dessert, I took one, Rebecca took one. Katherine took a big bite of the first one.

She freaked out. She started yelling that her mouth was frozen and she couldn't move it. Well, they did come out of the fridge so I figured they'd be cold, but frozen was a bit of overkill. So Ian took a bite. After the first second or so, he started to hack, he made odd convoluted faces and looked for a place to spit it out. OK, I'd opened one, it looked fine with no bruises, smelled fine, texture looked good. What on earth?

Everyone looked at me. Ian insisted I take a nice big bite. I didn't. I took a little corner. I chewed. The banana that seemed perfectly normal turned into the consistency of.... heavy powder. Which mixed with spit turned into a gluey mortar like substance that made it hard to chew and almost impossible to swallow. Ah, now I understood Katherine's exclamation of a "frozen" mouth. Her chewing ability was immobilized. It tasted like nothing, but a really bad nothing and certainly not like banana. The best description we could come up with was that it was dehydrated. Oh, sure it looked like a normal fruit, but it was just pretending.

Once I'd choked it down, I had to take some out that was stuck in my teeth and I examined it.

Ever eaten paper?

No comments:

Post a Comment