Pregnancy Cravings & Waste

As someone who has suffered extensively from morning sickness throughout this pregnancy, I’ve kind of been of the mind that if something sounds good then I need to eat it. It’s been rare that food actually sounds good and when I’m actually craving something it seems like a miracle. Thankfully, most of my cravings have been fairly healthy (well, except for the excessive Halloween candy consumption). Without a doubt though, the number one thing I’ve been craving is bananas.

Bananas are impossible to get in the village, sadly. With the exception of the occasional apple or orange, our teensy story doesn’t stock fresh fruits. Bananas are also just so fragile that getting any shipped out here is always a disaster. When I went to Anchorage for my last OB appointment though I took advantage and literally filled the extra space in my suitcase with bananas…about twenty of them. I’m so glad that we don’t have to go through security to fly back to our village because my excessive quantity of bananas may have raised a few eyebrows.

When I got back to the village though I realized that I may have bought more bananas than one person could actually consume before they went bad. Because of this, I decided to get creative. Many of the bananas I simply ate over the next week or two, but the rest would have gone bad if I didn’t find something else to do with them. With the first half of my extra bananas I just froze them. To do this I just sliced them up thinly and laid them out on a cookie sheet to freeze overnight. Then, I transferred them to a ziplock bag and stuck them back in the freezer. All of my frozen bananas then went towards making me delicious smoothies. I LOVE smoothies and like to have one almost every day, so having the frozen bananas has been a real treat.

The rest of the bananas have gone towards banana bread, which is another favorite of mine. I’ve been using the loaves to make myself little lunches each afternoon. Banana bread, whatever tasty fruit we’ve recently gotten in a shipment to the school, and some string cheese…yum!

I’m so glad that I found uses for the extra bananas because I was really dreading having wasted any, especially with how hard they are to come by out here. All in all, I ended up using up all twenty bananas between what I ate normally, what I froze, and what I baked into bread. There are a million other things I could have done with them, but these three ways worked pretty well for me.


5 Responses to Pregnancy Cravings & Waste

  1. Another good use for bananas is banana ‘ice cream’. Slice and freeze for a few hours, then pulse in a food processor until not too chunky and then put on full until it turns into lovely, almost fluffy, ice cream. You can eat it straight away or put back in the freezer. It freezes pretty solid though, so bring out of the freezer 10 mins, at least, before you need it. It tastes almost as creamy as real banana iced cream, but not quite. Certainly healthier though!

  2. Wow! we are so fortunate in Philadelphia as we can get almost any fruit at anytime. That being said, I still have bananas that ripen too quickly and I freeze them in slices. But I just eat the slices frozen – they are delicious just like candy or I mix them with a little almond milk and the get like milk crystals all over them. So good- glad you found so many uses for your bananas

  3. Grilling bananas helps bring the natural sugars out and creates a nice caramelization on them. A great side dish for lunch or dinner. Slicing them up and dipping the slices into chocolate and then freezing them is a great treat later on when you have a sweet tooth. There are also awesome cookie recipes where you can use overripe mashed bananas as the base.

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