Since I love cooking and am familiar with most of the Spanish Caribbean’s cuisine, particularly Cuba, I figured I’d start a “segment” about cooking with what you can find in your local bodegas. Convenient, huh? It won’t always be Caribbean, but you’ll be able to make it with locally available — and dirt cheap — ingredients.

Plátanos maduros — fried ripe plantains — is a comfort food that also satisfies your sweet tooth. Nothing transports me back to Miami in this cold season like a plate piled high with those gooshy, greasy yellow blobs. Plantains look like gigantic bananas and are available year-round at literally any store that sells food in Bushwick. Sometimes if you luck out you can find them almost ripe at the store, but usually they are mostly green. You’ll have to buy them and then wait for them to ripen, usually a week or more, though you can speed the process up by putting them in a basket over your radiator, or inside a gas oven (don’t forget to take them out if you use the oven for something else!) They’re extremely cheap; you can buy several for a buck sometimes.

Your plantain should be black. Not yellow, that’s still unripe. Totally black. When you squeeze it, it should feel like it’s full of pudding. If it’s still firm, let it ripen more. If they’re too starchy they will come out crunchy instead of chewy, and those are tostones, something we’ll go into another time.

Trust me, it’s not ripe yet.

When you’re sure the inside is uniformly puddingy, carefully cut the top and bottom of the plantain off with a very sharp knife, otherwise you’ll mash the inside ends. Then run your blade just barely through the skin on two sides and peel it away. The contents should be a barely stable banana shape. With your sharp knife, slice the plantain on a diagonal into pieces about an inch thick.

While you’re doing all that, a pan with about 1/2 inch of some kind of fat on medium heat should be on the stove. Tradition demands lard, but since you can’t get lard at the store that isn’t hydrogenated, I avoid it. Soybean and canola are not fit to feed the pigs used to make lard. Olive oil is fine to fry in, and that’s what I usually use. Today I happened to have about a cup of beautiful, clear Berkshire bacon fat from breakfast this past weekend. Waste not, want not, right? It shouldn’t make the plantains taste like bacon, though even if they do, no big deal: if I have learned anything in my 27 years, it’s that bacon + anything = delicious.

When your fat is hot, start adding the plantain slices until you have one layer in the pan. If you have a lot, you can do it in batches. You can take them out when they turn from a peach color to yellow, but if you want them to caramelize — and you do — leave them in until they reach the desired golden brown on both sides (turn them over once). When they look close enough to the ones in the photo, pull them out and place on a paper towel to soak up any extra fat.

Eat ‘em. They should be gloppy inside and have a slight dry but greasy toast to them on the outside, with a few creme brulée-like patches of crunch. If you feel they must be part of a meal, put them on a plate with some kind of pork and rice and beans, but I have no problem scarfing them down alone. Enjoy!