Maybe Billy Bob Thornton was on to something. I have really adapted to this orange food thing. Specifically mangoes. Living in the Philippines has, in fact, made me an addict.
If you buy a mango in the store, whether fresh or dried in strips with sugar and sulfur dioxide and packaged, chances are that it came from the Philippines. Mangoes are big business here, and they grow and sell them everywhere. Any place that sells fruit, from the fanciest supermarket to the most ramshackle roadside stall, has a pile of ripe, juicy, pale yellow mangoes stacked and arranged like jewels. I bought them five or six at a time, six days being about as long as I could keep a ripe one from going over the hill in the fridge.
Morning mango became a daily ritual, and it was usually my first conscious thought upon awakening. One of my first conscious thoughts. Breakfast is a good time for mangoes, as you have to be near a sink to eat one; not a fruit you just pop in your lunch pail and snack on in your business suit. You eat a mango, you’re going to make a mess. A delicious, sticky, juice all over your hands and running down your chin mess.
The bartender at the hotel restaurant showed me how to prepare one. I thought I knew what I was doing when I lived in Hawaii. It wasn’t until I really began paying attention as Manuel deftly lifted the yielding flesh away from its pit with practically no waste that I realized I had been a rank amateur fumbling in the mango dark. Wash the fruit. Wash all your fruit, in fact, as you just don’t know where it’s been. Rest the mango in the palm of your off hand, stem end facing you. Lay the flat of a long sharp knife on the meat of your palm, very close to the stem. I can’t be responsible for what happens next when you try this, but start moving the knife back and forth through the fruit, using your palm to guide the blade. You can feel it scraping right against the edge of the pit; don’t wander away from it. Stay close all the way through. Flip it, do the same to the other side. If you do it right, there will barely be any meat next to the pit, it will all be in the two halves you cut. Then use the tip of the knife to cut a grid pattern in each half through the flesh but not the skin, turn inside out, and either bury your face in it or spoon out the cubes, depending on how genteel you want to be. Me, I’m standing over a sink trying to wolf the thing before I go to a filthy shipyard. Gentility is not my watchword.
Side note: if you dump all those mango cubes in a blender with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and a big slug of dark rum, good things happen.
