Bananas Peppers and More

  Our family is divided over bananas . The son and I hate it but the husband has to have at least one banana a day . He goes to the point of throwing a tantrum if we do not have bananas at home.  My mother is also the same .  Growing up , we had bananas growing in the backyard. In our culture , we put every part of the banana tree (or is it a plant?) to use.  We eat the fruit, the stem , the flower and the root. The leaves are steamed to make it soft and non-tearable and then used to pack food. Think about an ethnic or old world ziplock / aluminium foil. The smell of food wrapped in softened/steamed banana leaves is so aromatic it makes my mouth water. We bake spiced fish in banana leaves ... that tastes out of the world.  We also make a fried sweet dumpling out of rice flour and overripe bananas called the unniappams. We almost never bake banana breads because overripe bananas are always reserved for unniappams and because we do not appreciate the flavor of cin...

Being the disorganized person that I am , I have had multiple blogs and more than one email addresses over the past 10 - 15 years.  So why do I need another blog ? We went on a two and a half weeks long road trip in these times (to the future me : CoronaVirus Times) and I had an itch to document our trip. But I could not figure out my old email passwords / blog passwords etc . But I read through my one of my old blogs which had only around 10 posts and realized that I almost forgot that phase of my life. I forgot the good and ugly days and incidents that I never thought I would stop laughing about or stop crying about . I had a few posts documenting my Popsy's growing up dramas. Those posts overwhelmed me and I realized that I may have forgotten and lost such simple but warm and wonderful memories that happened in the last few years .  Yet another reason is because it was Nnds birthday a few days ago . We were just back from our road trip and were on quarantine. He did not wan...