The 411 on Bananas
I never imagined I'd be writing about bananas. Monkeys maybe, but not bananas. But who knew that all of my life I've been storing and peeling bananas the wrong way. Not only that, but what I learned about bananas from my mother is something I've been passing along to my own kids, and it's been wrong all these years! I've been a banana failure my whole life....that is until now!
I learned the 411 (another way of saying "information" for those of you who live in the jungle) about bananas from a friend who works as a Senior Executive for the Pampered Chef and knows all types of food tips and tricks.
But more than this article being about bananas, it's also an awakening for us all. It's important to realize that sometimes there's more to what we do day-to-day than we realize, and by thinking outside the box, we might be more productive than the way we've been taught. Perhaps the way we do everyday things becomes a custom, or we become accustomed to doing things a certain way but it's not always the right way, best way or most efficient way. Take purchasing and peeling a banana, for instance.
First, when you purchase bananas from a store and have a few days before you're ready to eat them, select them with a little green in them. That means they are not quite ripe. It will take 2-3 days for a green banana to ripen. If you want them to ripen faster, you can put a few in a brown bag or cover them loosely, and their own gases they emit called ethylene will help them ripen faster. And here's a very neat trick, remove each banana stalk by stalk, as separate bananas, and put them back in your fruit bowl or banana contraption, this helps slow their ripening. You will get a couple more days out of each banana before they go brown. And of course you all knew that as a banana ripens, they get sweeter with age, just like women!
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