Barbecued Bananas

You can tell it's Bank Holiday - The Hub has been car shopping, mowed the lawn and lit the Barbie. Not the plastic doll, you understand, but the outside thing, that you use for cooking a meal on. Well... I say 'barbie'... actually it's a disposable one - because five years into marriage, The Hub's man barbie is still in his Mum's back garden!! 

No matter, between the oven and the disposable barbecue, the job was done and everything was properly cooked. However, being a man, there was just one thing The Hub forgot - to buy anything of vegetable matter to balance out the protein and the carbs. 

'What shall we do for veg?' he asked, once everything was nearly ready. Oops!

Fortunately, I had bought some bananas today. It was at this point that I remembered being at a barbecue, some years ago, when baked bananas were the dessert. 

'Okay,' I thought, 'I'm sure we could give it a go.'

I also remembered trying this once before, without much success. However, I decided NOT to let that hold me back, and started googling recipes.

The most common recipe seemed to involve lemon, brown sugar and butter.  Brown sugar we did have, lemon we didn't have,, butter... we can't have. Although our dairy free marg. has been great for a number of things, I just knew it was not going to be fit for the purpose of this job. No, there had to be another way. 

When I spotted a recipe that used chocolate, I knew that I'd found The One!! Fortunately, along with the bananas today I'd also bought some dairy free chocolate 'coins' from Sainsbury's.

So, having grabbed some foil, slit my bananas down the side, and filled the slits with choccy buttons, I crimped the foil together and threw (well not literally, you understand) the bananas on the barbie. 

Before long they were sizzling away. I was quite surprised that the barbie seemed to have sufficient energy to do the job and was half expecting to have to chuck them in the oven, to really finish them off. 

Having given them 20 minutes or so, I retrieved them from the barbie with tongs and unwrapped them to cool down a bit. Once they'd cooled down sufficiently, I proffered one to Baby. Well, she scooped out the chocolate alright, but didn't much go for the banana. 

*sighs and rolls eyes*

It may look a bit black and horrible, but appearances can be deceptive!

Twenty minutes cooking time, although most recipes say fifteen, seemed about right to me, but maybe that's because our barbie was a little disposable one. The banana was nicely cooked and the chocolate sensationally gooey. We could have added marshmallows and ice cream but I left those out on this occasion.

It may not have been quite ripe, but it still went down okay!

Regarding the bananas, I had only had one that was properly ripe and so opted to use a nearly ripe one as well and hoped it would soften up. It did to some extent, but to anyone who hasn't tried this before, I'd suggest using bananas that are only just ripe. I think that overripe bananas would be too soggy and taste not very nice at all!

The next time I try this, I think I would try being all prepared in advance. I quite fancy the idea of dairy free caramel sauce and pecans being added on the top of my chocolatey banana - quite possibly using this recipe, which I've been meaning to try for some time. Now that really would be nice! Maybe, if the weather's nice, I might even try doing that tomorrow. Thing is, being Britain and  Whitsun Bank Holiday, what are the chances of that??