Ooh! I'll have the Speckled Bananas, please!

So, I'm afraid I've gotten kind of spoiled living in the big city. Up here in the north woods, the towns are small and you have to drive a minimum of 6 miles to find a grocery store of any kind, and then it's not much of one. I mean they have your basics: bread, milk, meat, liquor. But there just isn't the selection that I'm used to. I finally have the time to cook a little, and I have some awesome recipes to try, what with my new dutch oven and all...but try to find some of the items listed in the recipes, well, that's just not happening. I needed fresh basil; nada. Parmesan Reggiano cheese; I was lucky to find fresh Parmesan. I wasn't about to ask about the Fontina cheese. They DID have ricotta, though. I was bemoaning this fact to Mr. Trucker, who is something of a gourmand himself, and he commented that you are lucky to get a white or yellow onion, but you better just forget about shallots or leeks. He's right about that.

One thing that tickled me beyond measure though: They had bananas for .69/lb, which is pretty high. But for only .39/lb, the sign announced, you could get "Speckled Bananas". Is this some rare new variety? They look pretty much to me like bananas which have gone past their sell-by date, heck these bananas have gone past their eat-by date. You could make some really awesome banana bread or banana muffins with these speckled bananas.

Speckled Bananas

I didn't BUY these speckled bananas, I'll have you know. They were normal bananas when I bought them, they only became speckled after I didn't eat them fast enough.

I have to go now, I'm making an eggplant dish for supper. Mr. Trucker says he's glad he's missing it. When I was little, my Mom used to bread and fry eggplant and tell us it was fish to get us to eat it. I'm still traumatized over that. It's a wonder I learned to like eggplant after that, although to this day, I still won't eat tapioca pudding because my wonderful big brothers used to tell me it was fish eyes. Do any of you have lovely big brothers like mine?