Banana Mornay

It seems to be either a feast of famine as far as this blog is concerned. It really is a combination of what time I have available, and my mood, and the intersection of both is what actually creates posts on this blog.

One thing that I haven´t liked about blogging while travelling has been the lack of time that I can give to anything that I have been posting, which has a lot of the time led me to post things to this blog without giving them much of a look over, spellcheck or similar. Most of my posts are half completed trains of thought without sufficent effort invested to make them fully coherent. This partly due to these damn timers sitting to my side, laughing as they tick down the minutes until the screen darkens and I am booted from the system with little to no warning.

But this is completely off topic from what I was hoping to cover today.

Since I have been travelling I´ve had a huge amount of free time, and I´ve been filling this time in a number of ways. One of these ways is cooking. Cooking never really interested me in the past, and always seemed to be a chore that you had to do, but no one really wanted to. At some point though I made the connection between cooking and fun and since that everything has been gravy. The really fun part though is in the experimentation.

Now making something according to a recipe never really appealed to me that much. However cooking as a learning exercise is something that I have really been enjoying while I´ve been out and about. I´ve been paying attention to what some of the experts I´ve been spending time with have been doing with their own dishes, and I have been experimenting on my own with different combinations of food. One such experiment was something I have named ¨Banana Mornay¨.

Out of any dish, I would have to say that Tuna Mornay would have to be my favourite. But due to problems finding milk at any of the small shops in Spain, and the fact that I´ve cut milk out of my diet and probably shouldn´t be drinking it in the first place had been holding me back from making this. I have though, found an acceptable substitute with banana.

What I basically did was dice 4 bananas, and boil them in water until soft, caramelized and mushy. You then mash the boiled bananas until you have some sort of weird banana soup, and boil out the excess water until you have something of a similar consistency to the sauce for Tuna Mornay (Which I believe is normally made of a combination of milk and grated cheese). Add your tuna to this mixture, as well as onion (Which I forgot to add to my own meal, and I believe would be necessary to balance the taste) and you have something that tastes suprisingly good and is nutritious to boot. I ate the following with pasta as well, but the meal can stand on it´s own if need be.

So, my night to cook should be interesting back home from now on, as long as the rest of the family doesn´t mind not knowing exactly what to expect. Nothing I have made so far has been inedible so everyone should be safe though (Just differing levels of tastiness, based on what works well, what is medicore and what just tastes a little wierd together).

Note:
I believe the reason the banana does work as a good substitute for milk in this dish, and does taste similar as you have the natural sugars of the fruit in place of the regular lactose of a regular Tuna Mornay.