A Season for Mangoes

Now is the season for mangoes, and we couldn't be happier. These are mangoes like you've never tasted before, unless you have traveled somewhere in Asia. The flesh is bright orange and sweet, like concentrate. Rarely do we get an unripe one, as the best specimens are usually slightly bruised and a little brown.


They come in three sizes, like the Three Bears. The baby mangoes are about the size of an apricot. Once you peel off the skin, you can pop them in your mouth, chewing the tasty flesh from around the small seed. The medium mango is best peeled and then sliced, while the large mangoes resemble those commonly found in the US, except they are a brilliant shade of orange, not green or pink.

Although it's difficult not to go through a whole bag standing over the sink with the vegetable peeler, I like to put mangoes on yogurt for breakfast or with a flan or panna cotta for dessert.


In other news, our friends Eddie and Anya arrived a couple days ago bringing with them many sought-after goodies from the States. In addition to a bottle of Patron tequila and two bottles of Cholula hot sauce, they brought me a selection of food magazines and my new favorite toy, an iPod Touch.


I had been lusting after the Touch since touching one in Shanghai, but the prices here are slightly inflated. So unbeknown to me, Turner had Anya buy one for me and bring it with her. What a surprise! It has 16 GB of storage so I can put almost all my iTunes library on it, plus my podcasts. It also has Wi-Fi, so I can check my email, the internet, the weather, etc, and browse iTunes and the App Store, where I have found many fun applications.

I downloaded the complete (and searchable!) works of Shakespeare, PocketGod (where you have power over a group of islanders), and two culinary apps: AllRecipes and Betty Crocker. In the AllRecipes app, you just shake the iPod (literally) and three rows align like in a slot machine, matching a course, food group, and cooking method. Then the application gives you a list of recipes that match the result. You can also search the database, but it's much less exciting.

The Betty Crocker app has all 4000+ recipes from the cookbook and you can search by name or tell the app what ingredients you have and what type of meal you want to cook (like garlic AND bread/rolls) and then the app will find recipes that match these parameters. This could be very useful for cleaning out the refrigerator.


I have come up with the idea of a rotisserie chicken application, where you can watch a chicken turn on a spit, dripping juices, crisping skin, and all. There is already an iBeer application where you can slosh a glass of beer around the screen. I figured the chicken app would be the perfect accompaniment. Maybe there would also be an assortment of sauces you could rub on your rotating chicken, like barbeque or Buffalo wing. Now, I'm hungry.