Simple Sautéed Plantain Slices

Wanna know what lesson I most recently learned?  Take more videos!  I learned this for the first time when I studied abroad in Australia.  Somehow, I forgot.  I lived there with two awesome ladies, Lauren & Melissa. I think it was Lauren who said, “we must take videos”, and she was right.  The videos are so much more fun to watch after the fact than looking at the pictures!!  Hearing people’s voices, hearing the way they say things, seeing how they move and their gestures, capturing the hilarious ringtone of my international cell phone.  All the little things.  So fun to savor.  We forget so easily.

Same thing with our wedding.  Love, love, love the video.  Everyone told me beforehand to get a videographer, but I hesitated because with a wedding you’re already racking up costs left and right. Did you get a video at your wedding?  Do you think it was worth it?? I DO. Shout out to Studio Z Films who shot, edited, and played a video AT our wedding reception.  Since it was a NYE wedding, their same-day-edit was our countdown to midnight.  Um, goosebumps.

I need to remember to take more videos!!  Dan was smart and got a few at Kate & Nick’s Mexico wedding.  I should have taken more!!  Here’s a few of my fav’s he captured. Thank you, Dan!

Speaking of our recent trip, Tulum, Mexico was perfect for the wedding of two of my favorite people. It could not have been a more special and meaningful event. It was one of those weddings where you can seriously feel the love in the air and you just know it’s a good match in your gut. Anyone who knows Kate & Nick knows this.  You feel lucky to be witness and even luckier to be part of their lives. Have you even been to a wedding like that? I love those weddings.

I love the symbolism of this picture, how they look up to Kelly & Mike.  Figuratively and literally.

I was fortunate enough to be connected with them through a friend when I lived in Portland. Though neither of us lives there now, I look forward to any occasion where we get to meet up.

I get most of my cooking inspiration from things I eat when I’m out or traveling.  This is one of those.  Every morning at breakfast at our resort, they had these plantains sprinkled with toasted coconut and drizzled with something I guessed to be plain yogurt.  Delicious.  I figured I’d start simple and just try to cook plantains.  Fancy stuff later.

I’ve done this maybe three times now and the first time I used probably the greenest (least ripe) plantains (shown below).  I did find the more yellow/brown (more ripe) plantains the other times I cooked this and they were way easier to peel.  As for how to peel them I just searched YouTube for “how to peel a plantain”, watched probably two of them, and went after it.  Not as hard as I thought, but definitely more challenging with the green (less ripe) plantains.

This dish is very simple and a great alternative to potatoes as a starch at your meal.  They’re golden brown on the outside but soft and tender on the inside. They look a little like banana chips in the photo because I cut them pretty thin (~1/4 inch) that time I made them.  They weren’t crunchy like a chip though.  And I do prefer now to cut them a little thicker, more like 1/3-1/2 inch.

I’m on a plantain kick right now, sorry Dan, you’re going to be eating a lot of these for a while ’til I decide I’m tired of them.

More Mexico pics to come when I share my next Mexico-trip-inspired dish…