The Banana Lover's Cookbook: More Than Eighty Quick and Easy Recipes for America's Favorite Fruit

Lindquist, a Key West caterer, has created recipes using bananas for breakfasts and snacks, appetizers, salads, sandwiches, entrees and, of course, desserts. And while the nutrition-packed banana is an admirable and versatile fruit, this volume is filled with the kind of test-kitchen sorcery that can give exotic trappings to a food that may not be appropriate (as in the author's banana rumaki and banana gazpacho tropicale). Many recipes here are cloyingly sweet (like banana daiquiri pie and banana upside-down cake), with very few providing unusual contrasts or juxtapositions ofsweet, ripe bananas and complementary tastes. Among these: banana tomato chutney and banana ginger wafers. Inexplicably ignored are opportunities for recipes using the somewhat exotic plantain (a variety of banana that must be cooked) and banana leaves (employed as a wrapper for delicious steamed items in the cooking of Latin America and Southeast Asia). Lindquist's discussion of banana types is limited to outlining the differences between underripe, green or green-tipped bananas, firm golden yellow bananas, and brown, flecked or fully ripe bananas, although she makes the point that ``there are more than 450 varieties.'' (Feb.)