原创 How can you tell when a banana goes bad?

I just saw someone carrying an enormous bunch of bananas, which prompted me to muse on fruits in general and strangely shaped yellow ones in particular...

Sometime around the middle of last summer, I was sitting with my wife (Gina The Gorgeous) on our back deck the when she suddenly exclaimed: "Just how many different types of fruits are there?"

A lesser man might have responded: "Why do you ask, my dear?" But time has taught me that this is the path to madness. As fate would have it, however, she volunteered this information almost immediately of her own accord.

It seems that our friend Freddy from Malaysia had mentioned in passing that in America we really only have a relatively small variety of fruits available to us. By comparison, when growing up in Malaysia, it seems that one is surrounded by tremendous numbers of exotic fruits (I know, I know ... I could make so many non-politically correct jokes at this point, but I prefer to walk a higher path).

Anyway, I really didn't have a clue as to her question, so I whipped out our little netbook computer, performed a quick search, and found the most amazing resource on the Wikipedia website. This is a List of Culinary Fruits, which means that someone somewhere considers them to be edible. I didn't count them, but there's a whole bunch of them (if you'll forgive the pun), each with a link to its own Wikipedia page and photo and stuff.

This is GREAT... it kept my wife busy for days... I could hear her muttering away in the background exclaiming things like: "Oooh, look at that one!"

But we digress... one way to tell whether or not a banana has gone bad (which is, after all, the focus of this discussion) is to see how well it plays with other fruit as illustrated below: