Thanksgiving might just be my very favorite day of the year. Even with how bonkers I get for Christmas, if you were going to boil it down to one best day, I’d have to go with a day that required lists and planning and then a cooking extravaganza followed by a feast and a week of leftovers. All my favorite things.

Today I brought out the canner and made up a batch of my famous Sweet and Savory Cranberry Sauce. Now I’ll be able to enjoy one of the best parts of this best day, all year long.

I hated babysitting when I was a teen, but there was one family I would watch and it was because the mom was really into food preservation and always had home dried bananas in the house.

Bananas dried in a food dehydrator are totally different than the dried bananas you buy at the store. Those are toothbreakers. Home dried bananas are like little pieces of fruit leather, and super sweet as all the sugars get concentrated when the water goes away.

Since she made hers in one of those dehydrators they sell on TV, I thought that until I had one I would be left dried bananaless. But I cracked it. I made them in my oven.

I have experimented with many things, and let me tell you right up front that you don’t want to try this with anything other than parchment paper. Many bananas have been wasted in this discovery, but anything else either cements the bananas in place, or cements itself to the banana.

If your oven goes to 200, cook the bananas for a few hours, checking on them every half hour or so until they’re sufficiently leathery. If it doesn’t, you can cook them like a meringue. Preheat your oven to 450, turn it off, and then let the bananas cook with the carry over heat.

You could use these as you would any dried fruit, cereals, granolas, etc. But personally I just take the parchment paper to the couch and pop them like button candy.