Sometime’s the most delicious snacks are the one’s with the least ingredients… Enter my  youngest daughter Bella’s favorite snack… baked plantains. Just two simple ingredients, plantains and cinnamon. The big difference in how I prepare our plantains and vs. how most people prepare them is that we are not using any butter or artery clogging oil to make our plantains. If you’re asking yourself what the heck is a plantain… then you have probably never ever eaten in a Cuban or Caribbean restaurant! Plantains are similar to your typical dessert banana that we all grew up eating, but plantains have their own unique qualities that are actually quit different from the regular monkey-eating variety. For starters, these beauties look anything but edible by the dark spots and bruising on the outer skin. In fact if you were like me… when you have seen a plaintain in the grocery  store you probably thought to yourself… those look like rotten bananas. They are anything but! Most of the time a plantain is cooked in a dish vs eaten raw. The texture is chewier and not mushy like a typical banana.

Plantains Bananas Starchy Used as a vegetable Longer than bananas Thicker skin Resemble green bananas, but may be green, yellow or black Sweet Eaten as a fruit Shorter than plantains Thinner skin Color is green when not fully ripe, yellow when ripe