Things To Do With Mushy Bananas, and a Training Update

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I bought some of these little apple bananas to have something different to put in my oatmeal in the morning.  I tried to get a bunch that was still a little green to give me time to get through them all.  But, by the end of the week I had only eaten 2 and the rest were past their prime.  Usually brown bananas mean banana bread, or cake, or muffins, but given my kitchen situation (kitch sitch?) these are not an option for me.  Luckily for everyone, however, I had 2 brilliant ideas.


1. Fake Ice Cream

I found this recipe for making ice cream without a machine on kevinandamanda.com.  Basically you take some sweetened condensed milk, add your flavoring agent, and then fold in some whipped cream and freeze.  I guess if you wanted to be technical I think it's more of a semifreddo than an ice cream, but you know.  Whatever.

I added 4 of the smaller bananas to the sweetened condensed milk to get the amount of banana flavor I wanted, and threw in some vanilla and cinnamon as well.

I also added some chopped pecans.  I didn't measure but I think it was about half a cup.  This seemed fine when I was mixing everything but actually turned out to be kind of a lot in the finished product, I thought.  If I make this again I'd probably decrease it to about 1/4 a cup.

After folding in the whipped cream the mixture was a little denser than I remembered it being the other times I've made this recipe.  Adding 4 bananas where in previous versions I've only added in things like vanilla or cinnamon meant there was a lower ratio of whipped cream to everything else, so I was a little worried about the final texture.

But, after freezing for about 8 hours, the texture was perfect.  It was smooth and creamy, and pretty scoopable.  I think adding the bananas actually helped; the texture was a little denser but this meant that it didn't melt back into whipped cream texture while we were eating.  I remembered later that frozen banana's are often used to make fake ice cream, and I think I might continue to use bananas in the recipe in the future. Since this I used 4 bananas to make the flavor the strength that I wanted, I imagine that I could use just one or two to improve the texture without overwhelming the flavor I'm going for.

2. Banana jam

I don't remember where I got the idea to make banana jam, but I'm seriously happy that I did.  I didn't really have a particular recipe in mind, so I just Googled until I found this one.  I mashed my last 3 bananas (hooray!) in a saucepan with some butter, brown sugar, cinnamon and a little lemon juice.  

After the sugar dissolves let the mixture cook a few minutes more to give everything time to caramelize a little more and to let the flavors develop.  I don't know exactly how long I cooked it for, I pretty much let it go until I got bored of stirring.  I feel like it doesn't really matter as long as you don't let it burn.  It will thicken a little as it cooks, and the final texture will be a little like apple butter, except more gooey, if that makes sense.  The picture from the original recipe shows that their jam is a lot smoother, but I actually like the banana chunks in mine.

I let the jam cool down a little and then put it into this jar in the refrigerator.  It should be okay refrigerated for about a week or so.

As I write this, I am enjoying some of my delicious banana jam on some toast with coffee (pumpkin spice with half and half).  I'm really happy with how it turned out, with good banana flavor that's kind of mellowed by the brown sugar and cinnamon.  I anticipate putting it into my peanut butter sandwiches and stirring some into my oatmeal as well.  Putting some on top of my banana ice cream might be a little much, but I bet it would be fantastic on top of vanilla or caramel ice cream.  

Okay, now it's time for a marathon training update:

The Honolulu marathon is less than a month away!  I'm excited, but also a little worried.  I've been having a lot of trouble with my knees and calves recently.  It's hard to know what to do, because I don't want to undertrain and not be prepared on race day, but at the same time I don't want to overtrain and risk a major injury.  I've been taking days off here and there (in addition to the rest days that are built into my training program, I mean), which has worked as a short-term fix but doesn't help much for the long term.  For example, I skipped last weekend's long run, which got me through Monday and Wednesday's runs, but not Thursday's.  Thursday actually was the first time I've ever had to stop in the middle of a run because of an injury, and this was very concerning to me.  So, I've decided to take a full week off of training.  I'm hoping that giving myself this larger block of time to rest will allow my body to completely heal so that I can continue without any more issues.  I kind of feel bad about missing so many runs, but I'm also worried that if I keep pushing myself I'll end up with a more serious injury.  To make up for missing this week, I'll take one of my taper weeks and turn it into a long-run week.  I remember doing this the last time I trained and I don't think it was a problem.  I do worry a little about people thinking that I'm a slacker or that I'm not serious about my training, but I know that this is silly and that making sure I don't injure myself is more important than what people think.  I'm also going to skip my TRX class next week which will be sad, but I figure if I'm too injured to run I can't justify going to TRX.  Beyond skipping my training runs I do feel bad about not working out for an entire week, so I'll see if I can find something low impact to do.  Pushups?  I don't know, I'll think on it.  Maybe I'll do one of those videos for old people where the whole workout is done while sitting in a chair...