I finally picked the bananas from the back garden today. It's four months since they reached full size, and only now have they started to turn yellow - we were starting to think that they might never do so.

They are the best I've ever tasted - the small, intensely sweet Caribbean kind rather than the larger and less flavoursome bananas grown by big, evil multinationals in Latin America.

Pam is cooking dinner for friends this evening, and she's going to flambé them to make New Orleans' most famous dessert, bananas Foster.