Best banana chips

I'm not a huge fan of banana chips. This is due to a legacy of over dosing on them when small (sadly the same effect was not forthcoming for cake, or chocolate). They - the banana chips - sort of suck you in with their super sugariness, fooling you into thinking they are in any way healthy (I'm talking about the coated ones) when they're not.

My daughter regards banana chips as the ultimate treat. I am not sure how I've succeeded in conning her into believing that dried fruit trumps Haribo* sweets (which I never, EVER buy her since they have zero nutritional benefit unless you're stuck in a lift and about to die and they're all you have in which case I guess the sugar would keep you alive) but I have.

Every Saturday we go to the local market and I let her buy 20p of banana chips, which are of the coated variety and taste, to my mind, of shite. But she likes them and the occasional treat ain't bad. When we go to Waitrose she sometimes asks if she can have the more expensive banana chips in packets and which aren't coated with loadsa sugar, which I sometimes let her have even though they are, have I mentioned, expensive: like £2 for what amounts to about five pieces of dehydrated banana, which gram for gram must surely make it more expensive than, perhaps, gold or something.

Last week when we were in London, we went to the John Lewis Food Hall, aka the poshest Waitrose you can get and I bought her some Slow Dried Cavendish Banana. They aren't chips at all (sorry about the misleading title, but "banana bits" might not have registered in the same way) but chunks of banana that look, frankly, like shite.

Voila the packet, they cost £1.99 or so for 200g. For those of you interested in such things, they contain 385kcal per 100g, 3.9g protein, 82g carbs (of which 74g are sugars), 1.8g fat and 7g of fibre.

This is what's inside. Looks like a piece of poo init? But trust me much more yummy.

But God they were delicious. They're 'slow dried' and don't have anything added to them, but they're chewy, naturally very sweet and just really pretty fucking delicious. So much so that I ended up eating way loads more than I planned and ended up with really sticky fingers before I'd even got back up to ground floor in John Lewis, which I then plastered all over the escalator rail (sorry about that).

In fact, as I photographed the packet, there are two pieces left which I would have snaffled and stolen from my own flesh and blood, had I not just eaten two pieces of dark chocolate.

Talking of chocolate, and talking of Zotter chocolate as I was last month. When I was back at the JL Food Hall I bought another flavour: 70% cocoa with wine and pumpkin. It was just GREAT. Although my parents weren't impressed. My mother took one bite and it launched her into a tale of some chocolate she once had which "wasa so awful, I hadda to spitta itta out".

You really have to try this - Zotter - chocolate if you come across it.

Anyway the banana bites/bits. Would be really good for packed lunches and the like. So, er kinda topical in that tedious back to school way...

*When I was chamber-maiding during school holidays I once went in to clean someone's room and they had a packet of Haribo sweets and I couldn't stop eating them, so much so that I ate about 3/4 of the packet and had to then carefully position each sweet in the packet to make it look like there was more than there was. I so get how people like the chewiness, very addictive. But I still won't buy them for my children.