If you had told me as a kid that I would eat meat and bananas together in a dish, I would have called you, “crazy”! Some cuckoo chef over at Simply Delicious is playing a weird joke on people with 9-27: West Indian Meat Casserole, but this dish is rated mostly edible. Jamie wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole. 🍌
I don’t really see how this dish is festive. It also isn’t very attractive, at least, not in the way I prepared it.
I thought of buying plantains for this recipe, but it literally states you can use regular bananas.
The ingredients for this dish are very colorful and there was a lot of chopping involved.
I had some leftover chopped red onion in the refrigerator which saved me some chopping. I added the white onion and garlic into the pan with the red onion and let it cook down in the oil.
In a separate pan, I melted the butter and added my chopped (not quite coarsely ground) meat.
I stirred the beef until the pinkness was gone.
Check out the translucent onions and garlic.
The recipe called for coarsely ground beef so I chopped the beef down into smaller chunks and added it into the pan.
Canned chopped tomatoes go into the pot.
Next I added chopped apple and red peppers into the pot. So much chopping! 🍏
After I added the spices and lemon juice (out of lemons when I cooked this), I added the beef broth.
As instructed, I covered the pot and let it cook for 15 minutes.
Finally I added the bananas and almonds to the dish. Never have I thought almonds and beef would go together, especially not with bananas.
This shot shows the casserole just before I served it into a dish.
The final dish is very colorful with accents of yellow, various browns, and red. The bananas melt in your mouth while you chew the beef and the peppers add a snappy bite to the dish. There are multiple mouth feels going on at once, an essential part of a good casserole. The apple adds an acidic, bright note to an otherwise nutty, earthy dish. This recipe made enough servings that I was eating this for lunch all week! Jamie is rightly frightened to eat beef and banana together, but I pulled my bravery together to finish this wacky dish. 🏋
GRADE: B-
