I love to grow things in the yard. If those things produce food so much the better. In this yard we have planted bananas, plantains, pineapple, yucca, and a few other interesting things. I even have a cacao plant which if the plant gods smile on us, might eventually produce fruit. Wouldn’t that be cool!

Food plants in the yard is a very common thing here. Besides fruit trees you often see guandu (pigeon peas, a Christmas holiday tradition), corn, plantains, squash, and peppers.

A friend gave me a couple plantain pups, and one of them fruited recently. Plantains are eaten green as like a starchy vegetable, sliced or grated into soups and other dishes, but the most popular use is ffor patacones. Those are fried chunks smashed flat and fried again until they are something like yummy little saucer shaped french fries. Ripe plantains are also very good. They turn yellow, and often you see them for sale so ripe they are partly black. Inside the ripe fruit is like a banana but firmer and larger. They are usually sliced on the diagonal and fried for a sweet treat after a meal. Today I put one in a smoothie with other fruit and it was great. A friend gave me a drink once of ripe plantain, milk, vanilla, and I’m sure more sugar than I should have but it was SO good, like rich, delicious liquid vanilla ice cream.

One day I noticed something much thicker than a leaf emerging. It was the beginning of this flower, photo taken 6/9.

6/10, the flower is starting to open a bit

6/11, open more to reveal plantains in side.

6/12 things are progressing rapidly

6/13 Every day another set of fruits emerges

6/14

6/15

6/18 Things aren’t happening as fast now so I stopped taking photos every day.

6/27, things look more or less the same

6/29 I was told to remove the flower so the fruits would get fatter. Later a friend shared a recipe for banana flowers that I’ll have to try next time.

8/17 I notice the tree is looking a bit ragged and the leaves are starting to turn brown. I was told the plantains look ready. The pup next to it was just inches tall when the flower first emerged, and look at it now!

9/1 The tree is looking pretty done for

9/1 and we have cut the plantains. One of them split open so we figured it was past time.

Since the camera is out, I figured a photo of the heliconias was a good idea too. Do you see the star like green leaves on the knobby gray stems in the lower left part of the photo? That’s yuca. More on that later.

We also cut down our fruiting banana tree on 6/13 and got a big bunch, enough to eat, freeze, and share with the neighbors.

I don’t use a lot of plantains, but we have had very good luck freezing bananas. I may use one or two plantains for soup, and I think I’ll let the rest get ripe, slice and freeze them, and use them for smoothies. I have been using some of the frozen bananas in my oatmeal pancakes so maybe I’ll try the next ripe plantain and see how that works. (My absolute favorite though is oatmeal pancakes with mangoes! Who would have thought?)

You can see some of my yuca in the photos above (It’s called cassava in a lot of the world if you want to look up info). It has green sort of star shaped leaves on knobby gray stalks. It was growing wild at the end of the street so I just cut some and stuck some 8-10 inch pieces of the thick stems in the ground with a bit showing above the ground. It took off an grew! (so much it tends to fall over or get in the way when it gets really tall and leggy) I dug some a while back and it was the best yuca I’ve had, white, tender, and delicious. It’s very much like a potato so you can boil it like potato slices, or if you want something really good take the boiled slices and fry them in oil like french fries. I have also put them in the food processor to make something like mashed potatoes, and that’s also excellent.

The other day I dug out one root for some soup I was making. Then, I went back the next day to dig up the rest of the plant and this is what I found under the ground! I knew it was really big and I should have dug it some time ago, but I still had yuca in the freezer from the last plant.

This yuca was also excellent! The really big pieces needed more cooking but they came out fine.

Joel was excited by the big piece which was a long as his arm and weighed 7 pounds.

This yuca seems a little different than what I’ve bought in the store. It has the typical brown skin but under that there is another thick, purplish white skin which can easily be peeled off with your fingers, which makes preparing it a snap. Thank goodness the stuff freezes well! Besides putting it in the soup, we had mashed yuca for dinner two nights. There are three quarts more of mashed yuca in the freezer along with 2 gallon size bags of cooked, sliced yuca. And, I still have about half of the super big root yet to cook.

Hungry? Come to our house!  Our freezer is one of the most useful things we have. We bought it because we bought all that pork last year, but now it has bananas, yuca, tons of mangoes I picked up when they were in season, star fruit, various things we bought in quantity from Pricesmart, and who knows what all else.

Life in Panama – now that we have the time we can cook everything from scratch, use what is available around us, and we eat really really well.