Going Bananas...

I frequent a local fresh food market. They have crazy cheap prices but you never know what you're going to get or what kind of prices they'll be. One day I can walk in and they'll have strawberries for $.99 a lb, the next day you could walk in and they would be three lbs for a dollar. Each day the prices adjust based on the the supply from their trucks.

I was in there last week grabbing some fresh goodies when I saw a sign. "40 lbs for $3". I looked down and they had these large boxes of del monte bananas. We go through a lot of bananas every week but 40 lbs is totally over the top. Yet I couldn't resist the good deal. So I drove home with the box trying to figure out what I was going to do with them all and it was then that I decided to use every single banana without letting any of them go to waste.

My first thought was to dry some with our dehydrator. Steve had just asked me last week when I was going to make banana chips because we had run out a while ago. My reply, "when I find them for a good deal". I hit the motherload of all good deals on banana so I started drying them. I quickly filled all of my trays without making a dent in the box. So the next morning I borrowed another dehydrator and continued drying. Each batch took 24 hours and I quickly got a fresh batch drying as soon as I could. After 42 trays of chips I realized we had a lot of bananas. And I wouldn't get all of them dried before they went bad.

I turned my attention to banana bread. Each loaf takes 3-4 bananans so I could go through quite a few in just a few loaves of bread. (recipe found here) I had great visions of taking my kids to go deliver them to friends and family. But I finished all the loaves just two hours before Steve and I left for the weekend so instead I bagged them up and threw them in the freezer. (my recipe freezes great!)

This morning I noticed the bananas were quickly going bad and everything in me wanted to just toss them. But my inner voice kept repeating "no banana left behind". So I busted out 108 muffins. Thats right, 108. If you subtract the two that Hunter had for lunch, the two Bennett had for lunch, the one Hallie ate for a snack and the two that I ate for a snack we were left with 101 muffins. They too were packaged up and sent to the freezer to use in the future in Hallie's lunches.

And that my friends is how you utilize 40lbs of bananas for $3. I'm praising myself for only purchasing one box when I was so tempted at the time to buy two. Because 40lbs ended up being much more than I imagined - 80lbs would've been crazy.