Mangoes for breakfast, mangoes for lunch, mangoes for dinner, but be wary if a man says this to you…he’s saying you got “shape”.
On a visit to the tiangis today (weekly outdoor marketplace), I discovered that there are (at least) three varieties of mangoes. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me, there are different varieties of every other type of fruit, but, being innately exotic for anyone born and bred in the upper hemisphere, it never occurred to me that the mango I have always known wasn’t one of its kind. I still haven’t mastered how to properly cut up a mango. Like the pineapple, it is a quirky fruit that makes you work for all its juicy goodness (did I just say “juicy goodness”? No I was not a TV child…). So I’ll just have to keep practicing until I get it right. Oh darn. The problem is the wide but flat pit in the middle. Basically you can cut off each of the flatter sides (mangoes are oblong and unsymmetrical), and then, well, that’s the part I haven’t gotten yet. I love the way they serve mango in Thai restaurants, leaving the fruit on the skin and cutting into the flesh making squares. Then they push the fruit part out, making it not only pretty but easy to fork off a square at time. But who eats mango with a fork? Okay, maybe in a restaurant…
Disadvantages to mangoes? Besides that the plural is spelled with an “es” and I keep forgetting that as I type, they are stringy and tend to get stuck in your teeth, and the smaller variety that I tried today stain the lips a little (or I just eat like a pig. Go ahead, you can say it.). Next week I go back to the tiangis to do an official taste test complete with photo reportage: everything you never thought to ask about mangoEs and possibly other bad pickup lines used by the local hombres.
Holy plagiarism Batman! Just as I’m getting ready to sign off I half-heartedly type “mango” into Google images and come up with a whole poster full of mangoEs. How brilliant is that. I hope the Hawaiians don’t mind me borrowing.
