This is a variation of what my mom used to make me for breakfast when I was going to school as a kid. She’d slice up a banana on bread, stick a slice of cheese on top and stick it in the toaster oven. It comes out nice and warm so you get a breakfast with plenty of energy to keep you going through the day. My version above is a little different, it’s just toasted bread (heated with a frying pan anyway) and a spread of cream cheese on top. I then slice bananas into the frying pan, adding cinnamon powder and a bit of milk while lightly heating the mix. This is just to soften and sweeten the bananas up a bit as the heat works to pull out the extra flavours and sweetness of the bananas.

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Woke up to the biggest snow storm in NYC for a while. I just opened the door from my apartment and was greeted with falling snow and a blanket of white. I didn’t even realise it had started snowing earlier in the night as unlike rain, you don’t hear the snow.

There was so much snow, it was a few centimetres of it at least. You could move your hands through the freshly fallen snow and it’d just slide off. It’s very light and fluffy, much like freshly shaved ice for the Malaysian dessert ais kacang.

The snow storm lasted throughout the day up until after lunch time and it’s nice to look at when you don’t want to concentrate too hard on work. Heh, but as nice as it looks, the snow causes havoc for daily routines as planes are grounded and traffic slows to a crawl. Throughout the day you could see trucks ploughing the snow off the streets.

By the evening, most of what was on the ground was cleared off. If you haven’t moved your car since the night before, you’d be seeing about 10cm of snow over it. I saw people with brooms just trying to push the ice off.

Melbourne weather is dull by comparison. It doesn’t rain as hard nor does it snow there. These are slightly more extreme conditions and while it makes life more interesting, it also complicates things as you get flash floods occasionally and when there’s snow you need to shovel it off the pavement so that it doesn’t harden and make the ground slippery to thread on. Heh, just a lot of extra work to keep things going, but people have been living like this for the past hundred odd years, so this is probably something people get used to.