h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Everything you've ever wanted to know about bananas but were afraid to find out...

http://www.h2g2.com/A394021

Need to find a way to delete forum entries and repost.

A fantastic and really informative entry - deserves to be included in the "Edited Guide"...very interesting all the way through.

Some formatting/layout changes ( the names of the recipes etc...) might be considered, but apart from that very very well done!

I agree; nothing really that needs to be changed in this article. Put the recipe titles in tags, methinks, and make the http references into tags. The only content change to make is to fix the daiquiri recipe (and clearly you need more info to do that). Fixing this would also clear up your only use of the first person. Also for style, you might put the "for more great recipes" statement after the recipes rather than before.

Wow. This article is quite handy. I never knew bananas didn't grow on trees!!!

Please, do approve this entry, guys... it's given me another reason to go and talk to the beautiful produce boy that I work with... "Did you know..."!!!

Played with my entry it a bit more - I'm still learning GuideML, and so when I learn a new tag, I put it in. (BTW... this is a great place to learn markup language, esp. for anybody - like me - that's been too chicken to try before)

I would suggest that you rephrase the sentences about the banana being picked "from the tree", since later in the article, you say that it is not a tree.
Just seems a bit inconsistent to first call it a tree, and then say that it's not a tree.

oh, yeah.... duh!

This is a really comprehensive and deserving entry, and one that answered many of my banana-related questions. Please get it pronto into the edited guide!

Made some banana liquor t'other day... yum!

This entry rocks!

The only suggestion I have is to eliminate the use of first person in your footnotes (I think it was footnote #1 where I saw this).

Great work and wonderful writing, too!

Mikey

Gracias, Mikey! I think I've eliminated the first-person problem.

I'm thinking about playing with pictures... I'll have to find a good source for pictures of bananas.

Great!
Thanks!

Bake at 400 degrees? That sounds a bit hot, unless you're talking those strange American degrees? Perhaps you should put in "400 degrees F (200 degrees C)".

Well, I am a strange American, after all! You're right - I need to include European measurements as well as American... Thanks!

Hi!

A great article

You are still referring to a banana 'tree' in 1st sentence of 2nd para.

Would it be worth mentioning the banana lookalike you can't eat raw (the plantain)?

My favourite banana recipe is easy peasy and great to ease hangovers (and to feed babies):

- One banana (ripe)
- Half a pint of full cream milk
- A table spoon of brown sugar (the browner the better) OR palm sugar.

- Place ingredients into a bowl. Mash. Eat.




- Adam

As far as I'm aware, it's not so much that bananas have sterile seeds but they don't produce any seeds at all (which does make them sterile). Originally, wild bananas were full of seeds but the ones we eat ain't. Can anyone confirm this?

btw, use 'nor', not 'or', with 'neither'.

Great entry... I like it

Hi

This is a fab entry. Bananas are the fruit (or berry) of life... If we run out, the growling and snarling of early-morning low blood sugar begins...

Can I be really picky?

In the liquour recipe, you say "Never refrigerate bananas" and you've made this point elsewhere

Is "Karo syrup" something special, or is it something a little old English person won't have heard of? Cos this English boy doesn't recognise it... If it's something exotic, fair enough, cos I'm not that exotic...

You also mention the plant bearing "fruit"...just after telling us its a berry...

Or am I being incredibly anal?

*Great* entry, really comprehensive and I'm *right* up for the recipes!

A

I enjoyed that article so much that I feel hungry now. I think it should definitely be in the guide. Hope you don't mind if I pop over and tell the h2g2 vegetarian society about it. They've probably already found it, but just in case ...

It does seem odd that a plant would put all that energy into making sterile berries, doesn't it?

I'm glad you liked the article - by all means, spread the word!

Afrael: Karo syrup is one of those odd American substances... it's actually sugar syrup in a bottle that you can buy in the store. The sugar syrup can be made by hand. Just heat some water in a pan, and continue stirring sugar in until it looks about right (should be about the consistency of oil.) If you've got a sweet tooth, you might want to super-saturate the solution (continue throwing sugar in there until you see some collecting at the bottom of the pan) or if you want your banana liquor less sweet, make the syrup a little thicker than water. Be careful not to make candy - if you boil sugar too long, it'll harden and you'll have rock candy in the bottom of your pan. But really, it's very hard to screw the recipe up for the liquor. There's no cooking, so if it doesn't smell banana-y enough, then add more bananas. If it's not sweet enough, add more sugar syrup.

I'll add those instructions to the recipe. It's probably cheaper than buying syrup, anyway.

I did want to emphasize that the banana liquor mixture should not be refrigerated at any time. When I first tried the recipe, I made the mistake of putting it in the fridge. Well, I thought one week was an awful long time for a bowl of vodka and squished up bananas to be sitting on the counter. I checked it after a couple of days and noticed it had lost the aromatic banana scent. I took it out again quickly, and later added some non-refrigerated bananas and rescued the mix. It turned out to be very delicious. Now I want to experiment with different types of fruit, vodka, and sugar syrup. Maybe cranberries, or blackberries. Yum!

Now, about the berry/fruit thing. Isn't berry a fruit? I dunno. I thought all berries were fruit, but not all fruit were berries. Hmmm...

Salamander: I guess the bananas from the banana plant fall to the ground, to fertilize the earth for more rhizomes from the main plant... I understand that most rainforests have very poor soil.