Plantains.... Do this with them.

I love plantains. I particularly love them as a post-workout blast of clean carbs. But I swear that a couple of times that I have mentioned my penchant for them to friends, I have gotten a puzzled look and the question: "What do you do with them?"

It's easy, and since we have previously reviewed the fact that some cooking ideas are too ridiculously easy to be called an actual "recipe," may I suggest the following "idea" (not "recipe") for plantains?

Fry 'em in butter and cinnamon.

Look at that. You already figured out how to do it. But I'll tell you anyway:

Buy a bunch of plantains. Around this neck of the woods, the ones at Whole Foods are about 1000 times riper than the ones at Wegman's. I cannot vouch for whether this is a nationwide phenomenon.

You want the ripe ones. You want the really stupidly ripe ones, like almost black. If you buy them green, put them on the counter until they are, at a minimum, yellow, or, even better, damn near black. The blacker, the sweeter. The greener, the starchier.

Peel them. Slice them. Put a lot of (grassfed/raw) butter in a pan and melt it. I said a lot of butter. Dump all the sliced plantains in there and cook them on med/low heat. The trick is to cook them at a temp that is hot enough to make them golden brown but not burn the bejeeezus out them. This is going to vary with the stove and the pan. Because someone was really nice to us and got us a Le Creuset pan last year, I opt for pretty low heat because that pan gets super hot even on low, but do what ya need to do to get those puppies golden brown.

A digression: If you bought the really green plantains, like those ones at Wegman's, and you are positive that you will be paying college tuition for your newborn child before those plantains actually ripen, you can, er, sweeten the deal by throwing some ripe bananas into the mix, but that is: (a) sort of cheating, (b) not as all-fired clever as you might have thought because the bananas get crazy mushy in the pan.

Somewhere near the end of the whole process, dump enough cinnamon on them that you think you've gone a bit overboard in the cinnamon department. You haven't.

Cook just a bit longer. Eat.

See.... Not really a recipe, was it? But one hell of a good idea.


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