"plantains" news and stories

Each Thursday, we round up a selection of scrumptious links from our friends over at YumSugar. Here's what they've got cooking this week:

• Yes, you can! -- ditch the supermarket and make these 10 food items, that is.
• In these lean times try easy on the pocketbook and easily jazzed up red beans and rice.
• This plastic will fit nicely next to your ATM card.
• Say hello to the banana's big brother.
• With only two pans and some cans of soup, you too can make a panini.
• Do you know what this squashing machine is?
• Chili purists, turn away -- delicious meatless chili in a slow cooker.

Each Thursday, we round up a selection of scrumptious links from our friends over at YumSugar. Here's what they've got cooking this week:

• If you still haven't recovered from the New Year's Eve hangover, try one of these salves.
• Kick off your post-holiday recovery with a winter salad.
• Do you dare cook plantains at home?
• A Mexican Christmas dinner is indeed traditional American.
• Start 2010 on the right foot with this mysterious piece of culinary tech.
• Will ramen finally graduate college, or will pho give it a failing grade?
• If you made a go-vegan resolution, why not munch on vanilla pound cake?

Breakfast may be the most important meal of the day, but that doesn't mean we typically plan for it. No, we often find ourselves staring vacantly into the refrigerator musing how we're not really in the mood for this and that is going to go bad soon and wasn't this good but too bad there's so little left of it and, gee, I totally forgot about that.

Some of the best breakfasts I've made have been thrown-together affairs, mixing random leftovers with eggs to unexpectedly delicious result.

Such is this breakfast recipe, which tosses together Mexican/Caribbean odds and ends dug out of the refrigerator. Recipe for my surprisingly tasty Tropicana Breakfast --so dubbed because it was invented one fine Sunday off of Tropicana Aveneue--follows after the jump.

David Blaine at From The Back Kitchen recently posted about his experiments trying to develop new menu items around plantains. Faced with nearly 50 pounds, I guess he had plenty of chances to explore. Blaine says he tried grilling and roasting plantains both with and without the skin. From the photos, it looks like most of the plantains were cooked when they were still quite starchy. Unlike bananas, plantains can and should still be eaten when their skins are completely black. My standby method is peeling them with a knife, slicing them on a bias into half- to quarter- inch thick slices and shallow frying them in either butter or vegetable oil. A good dose of kosher salt and cracked pepper finishes them off. A little hot sauce never hurt them either.