WOW!!!!!
Amazing photos!!! Thanks for sharing!!
Gina *BabyBlue*

Multi-variety banana clump 06/27/06

Banana heart male flowers that will be taken out today and cooked as vegetable.

Banana male flowers - as you can see, they will never turn into bananas. But these flowers supply the pollens for breeding purposes.

Close up of dried out male flowers. Note that they are not green colored unlike the female flowers. The male flowers simply dry out and shrivel and fall off.

Shows where I cut the male flowers of the banana heart blossom. Cutting this off will not increase nor decrease the size of the banana fruits. But certainly I cut this to be used as vegetable. Since I am not into breeding bananas, rather than have these simply produce litters of dried out flowers, better use it as vegetable. You can read on my banana heart blossom recipe in the recipe section of this forum.

My "Male-less" banana fruit bunch after cutting off the male flowers of the banana heart blossom:

Peeling off the tough outer sheaths from banana heart. The first step for using this as vegetable is to remove the tough outer layers.

After peeling off the tougher outer layers. Continue peeling off until the color turned ligther and the male flowers harder to separate. We actually have three useful products here:

1) On the left side, the tougher outer layers can be used as decorative plates to hold the food served.

2) Middle: The male flowers can be dried off and used as ingredients in some recipes

3) Right side: The tender portion of the banana heart which is used as vegetable in many banana blossom recipes. It indeed looks like a heart, that is why it is often called as banana heart.

To process the tender portion of the banana heart, we remove the stalk and cut into an inch of remaining bloom at the base

Then cut off and remove 1-2" off the tip

Split and chop banana heart any way you like, but for the major split, rub some lemon juice on the fresh cuts to prevent oxidation or blackening

Chopped up banana heart

Soak the chopped banana heart in warm brine (2 tbsp salt per quart water) with 4 tbsp lemon juice, at least 2 hours before rinsing and wringing the juices out of these. This process removes most of the undesirable unpalatable stuff from the banana heart. The finished product can be a foundation material for a whole lot of other recipes. In my case, I will simply use this to make Banana Heart Ginataan, one of my favorite dishes.

Meanwhile, my other banana plant has kept on producing female flowers. I will have a lot of hands on this one. This is a fruit of the second generation lump, already it is producing 5 times more fruit than the first generation: