I like bananas

Manzanitos hanging in our kitchen.
This is chapo, served at a local Pathfinder campmeeting.
Tocacho con pancitos y huevo.

One of the staple foods in the jungle is plátano, known as plantain in the States. The locals make an amazing amount of foods from plátano, either while starchy green, or so ripe the entire skin is brown.

Chapo is a soupy drink made from blended green plátano, milk powder, and sugar. It has a bland, somewhat bitter bananaish taste. Many times, chapo is served warm.

Tocacho is a hard dry ball made of mashed green plátano with additions of peanuts, onions, or garlic. It looks like a pale yellow snowball on your plate that scatters crumbs everywhere when you try to cut it. I'm not really a fan of tocacho, but you'd be surprised what you can eat when you're hungry enough.

Plátano can also be simply peeled and boiled. This method of preparation gives it a very different texture. I like boiled ripe plátano, but boiled green plátano tastes like cardboard. Many people like it in their soup.

Ripe plátano can be shaved into very thin slices and deep fried and salted--the resulting chips are called chifles.

My favorite type of plátano is maduro frito-the sweet ripe slices that are cooked in a pan. Many times they are too greasy for my liking in the menus, but out at the land we cook them without any oil at all, and they are delicious with our beans and rice. I like the burned ones, too.

We eat bananas, known as plátano dulce, nearly every day, and often twice a day. There is a variety called manzanitos that are fat and short. They have a dry, starchy sweet flavor. No one likes them, except for me and Alex. I always feel like a little monkey when I eat them.

Speaking of monkeys, as I write this I am staying in a sketchy hostel on the banks of the Ucayali river, and a pet monkey named Jorge lives here as well. (I asked his owner if she was familiar with "Jorge El Curioso," but she wasn't).

Jorge is very clever. He will peel a banana carefully using his four paws and agile tail. Then he will eat it very fast. If you reach out your hand to him he will scramble up your body and pull your hair.