The savory banana split

in this house, there are no rules

Hello, clowns!

I had a really hard time coming up with an idea for Food is Stupid this week. Who can blame me—I’ve been in and out of doctor’s offices prepping for cataract surgery. Nobody wants to think about getting incisions on their balls, including the ones inside your skull.

In a week from now I’ll be recovering, so it’s likely I’ll take a minor break from the newsletter (boo, I know). But despite how scary eye surgery sounds, it should only take a few days to spring back. I can’t wait to find out what dumb shit I said under anesthesia.

I was sitting on the couch feeling sorry for myself when I told Davida, “I’m having a hard time coming up with an idea of this week’s newsletter. This sucks ass. This whole week sucks.”

I heard her spitballing ideas to herself when she stepped into the bathroom, but I couldn’t make anything out. After a minute, followed by a flush, she emerged with a big smile on her face. A grin after coming out of the bathroom usually means I should wait a few minutes before going in, but instead she immediately started rattling something off.

“What about a savory banana split?” she asked. “You could use plantains for the banana, mashed potatoes instead of ice cream, banana peppers for the pineapple, mole instead of chocolate, and tomato sauce instead of strawberries! You can use whatsit, Easy Cheese, instead of whipped cream, and you have to use cherry peppers and seasoned nuts as a garnish.”

Jesus. This actually happened. She was only in there for a little while! It’s like she’d had some sort of unexpected spiritual journey while she went pee.

I immediately texted myself the grocery list (surely I can’t be the only one who does this) and drove to the store.

What a weird selection of ingredients to be buying in one shopping trip. This is more stuff than I usually purchase for the newsletter, but since Davida had clearly seen God while on the toilet, I had to follow her vision as closely as possible. Some Moses level shit right here.

First things first: I split the plantain and fried it up.

If you want to know my deepest, darkest secret, this was the first time I’d ever fried a plantain. I know. I’m really brave for telling you my story.

For some reason I thought I was somehow going to mess it up, but I dug deep inside my soul, and everything turned out okay.

I was mostly concerned that I was going to undercook it, which would leave it pretty mealy, but it turns out you can just poke at a fried plantain with a fork while it’s cooking to see if it’s tender. Believe in yourselves and embrace the fried plantain that lives inside you. Embrace someone else’s plantain while you’re at it.

Then I whipped up some instant mashed potatoes, which are one of the greatest culinary inventions that have ever been made.

Flakes that magically turn into mashed potatoes that you can then mix with butter, bacon, and all that other shit that your doctor yells at you about eating?! Incredible. Never take the marvels of this world for granted.

As the fried plantain halves cooled down, I prepared my savory banana split topping station.

I started with the sauce(ish) components. I portioned out some ready-to-use mole which came from a box (and is also a product that I didn’t even know existed). Then I dumped out some Taco Bell-branded chunky salsa, and finely chopped some banana peppers to stand in for the crushed pineapple.

Instead of using plain roasted peanuts, I opted to crush up some Mexican snacks called cacahuates Japoneses, aka, Japanese peanuts.

If you’ve never had them, they’re cracker-coated peanuts tossed in a soy sauce-based seasoning. I love their particularly crunchy texture, and the savory powder on the outside always keeps me coming back for another handful. I’ll occasionally grab a packet of them by the register at our local Mexican grocery store, but I’ve long had an uneasy truce with these things.

Like, as an Asian guy, should I buy peanuts with a mascot whose eyes have been clearly…Asianized? Is that a betrayal to my people? These are the hard questions I must ask myself every day as the greatest food writer in all of history.

I’d assumed this entire time that they were just a stylized snack based off what Mexicans thought Japanese flavors were, but it turns out they were actually invented in Mexico by a Japanese immigrant named Yoshigei Nakatani in 1945. They eventually grew into a Mexican staple. Because they’re delicious.

Okay, Mexican-Japanese peanuts, you sort of get a pass. But next time I’ll have to carefully sift through the packages with geishas and samurai swords on them to find the one that makes me feel the least conflicted.

It was time to whip out Scoopy, who some of you have seen in previous editions of the newsletter.

I’ve now decided that Scoopy and Harvey are cousins. You can see the family resemblance when they have family reunions such as this one. I hired Scoopy to dole out three perfect scoops of instant mashed potatoes onto the plantains and he did an admirably terrible job.

I spooned all the sauces and finely chopped banana peppers on top of the mashed potatoes, and it was already looking like a banana split.

I was a little skeptical about the Easy Cheese replacing the whipped cream.

In hindsight, it was a really good idea, mostly because it forms those attractive squiggles you get with canned whipped cream. You eat with your eyes before you eat with your ass, you know?

Then came the last two details, the cherry pepper and the crushed Japanese peanuts.

Huh. Would you look at that!

The savory banana split was somehow spot-on, if you ignore all of the actual ingredient choices and the clear fact that there was Easy Cheese on it. It felt sort of like what happens if you give someone a photo of something and ask them to recreate it without knowing exactly what it is.

Davida ambled into the kitchen and I grabbed a few spoons.

As you can see, it takes a little effort to dig through a hard-fried plantain with a dull kitchen utensil, but the effort was worth it. That’s because this thing was fucking awesome.

Based off the unlikely combination of it all, it doesn’t sound like it would have worked so well, but it did. All the acid from the banana peppers and Taco Bell-branded salsa cut through the potatoes and starchy fried plantains, and the boxed mole added some velvety fat to each bite. Then there was the smooth salty spray can cheese with the crunch of the questionably marketed Japanese peanuts, which added even more texture against the chewiness of the fried plantain.

Basically what I’m saying is that this is some Michelin-level shit that Noma could never dream of creating. Eat our asses, Redzepi. We’re the captains of this shitshow now!

A savory banana split, who’d have thought? And to top things off, it was mysteriously inspired by my wife’s trip to the bathroom. What happened in there, nobody will ever know. I could just ask, but everyone says that the key to success in a marriage is to keep some mysteries alive.

It doesn’t hurt when one of those mysteries helps you write the greatest newsletter about food of all time.

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Okay, everyone—I could use your help! This is just a reminder that Food is Stupid can’t exist without word of mouth. If you’re a free subscriber (which is totally fine!) I’d hope that you could at least give me a boost by sharing this with your friends and family. Even a single email forward helps.

Of course, there’s social media, too, which is why I have this handy button for you. I’m finding that social media isn’t as powerful as it used to be, so really, even texting a link to people you know really does make a huge difference.

And of course, the newsletter can’t exist without your financial support either. It really is just I, Dannis Ree, the greatest food writer in all of history, just hacking away at this thing every week with the intention of sowing culinary chaos among the land. Don’t forget to upgrade your subscription today.

If every one of you switched to a paid subscription, I’d be able to do this full time. Like, no shit. But in the meantime, I can hope that you’d more realistically help me chip away at the inevitable medical bills that are coming. And don’t worry, the money doesn’t go into a hole—you get exclusive editions of the newsletter plus full access to the archives either via the web, or the Substack mobile app.

Okay. Time to steel myself up for next week. As always, I love you all, and I’ll hop into your inboxes real soon, hopefully with some much clearer vision.