Scenario:
1. You just got a Trader Joe's and you want to buy everything in there.
2. You just ate a lot of your friend's expensive fruit leather while she was taking a nap and you feel guilty.
3. Your mom asks if you'd like to bake something with her 500 overripe bananas.
Solution:
Banana Leather. I looks like leather. For real. It tastes like bananas/caramel/honey/cinnamon/lime. It gives your mouth a workout in just the right way. It cost you: nothing (if using your mom's ingredients), or way less than it would to buy it (even at Trader Joe's).
So Cheap, So Easy (if you are going to be home for, like, 2-5 hrs) Banana Leather
Directions:
Blend 7 ripe bananas (or equivalent amount of other fruit [I would cook apples first]), 2 T lime juice, 4 T honey, and a generous pinch of cinnamon until smooth.
Pour onto a parchment-ed cookie sheet.
Bake at 225 degrees for...well...it depends. Probably about 2-4 hours. If you think you have enough batter to spread between two cookie sheets, I would. The baking time will depend on your oven/the humidity/liquid content of the fruit/size of your cookie sheets/etc. You will see that mine got nice and dark; the middle is like classic fruit leather and the edges are like caramelized banana bark/brittle, which is fine with me. It looks like it would be hard to pull the parchment off the back, but it wasn't.
Enjoy,
Tofu
