Bananas are the new eggs

The man who travels furthest never leaves his room. The sage who strives for nothing achieves the most.... these are the kind of paradoxical ideas that I'm trying to wrap my western brain around as I attempt to organise my thoughts on Chinese medicine and Chinese philosophy. I sort of get it, but then that's not the point. One thing I'm loosely understanding is that the Western habit of nailing everything down to a defined, unambiguous, system of thought is not the Chinese way. The Chinese have made little attempt to resolve the apparent conflicts in their medical system. It's called syncretism - the co-existence of seemingly incompatible systems, without any attempt to do the western thing of finding out who is right and who is wrong. My brain resists. This must be good for me.

Thankfully, right at the point where my study Yang was beginning to Yin out, I took a break to watch the perfectly balanced Earth, Air, Fire and Water of the Olympics opening ceremony and , while I was letting my brain figure out how to work that into my assignment, I took a foodcam pic of my breakfast.

I used to have this crazy thing with eggs. I always had to have an oversupply of eggs in the house so that I would never run out of them. Lately, my egg paranoia has relaxed, but I'm now all about bananas. Every morning I check my banana supply and make an emergency run to the organic shop if my fruit bowl is looking deficient, even though I'm sure those organic bananas must be just packed full of environmentally unfriendly food miles. This morning I made a very delicious thing with my globe-trotting bananas. I assembled a sweet potato pancake and then sizzled some banana slices in the pan while spinkling them with erythritol. The smoking erythritol did set off the fire alarm, but the end result of sweet, slightly crispy bananas was worth the assault on my eardrums, plus I got in some plyometrics while jumping around and flapping a tea towel at the smoke alarm. Given my history with creating pyrotechnics in the kitchen I don't think it was one of our more brilliant ideas to install that thing just a few feet from the stove...