Much ado about mangoes

My first mango

I had my first mango when I was 20 years old or so, while I was visiting a friend of my mother's in Mexico City for a month. Gloria and her children were great hosts, and one of the things they showed me how to do was to make "tortugas" (turtles) from mangoes. I'd never tasted a mango before, and my first reaction was that they tasted a little bit like fruit that had gone too ripe. But with enough exposure, I became a total mango fan.

Tortuga.  (Today's mango)

More than 30 years pass

I didn't eat many mangoes in the United States, especially after I became a convert to various frugality and 'locovore' movements.  Locally grown mangoes, after all, don't occur naturally in south-central Pennsylvania. Before I came to Panama, my fondest mango memories happened when our local soup kitchen got a shipment of them. The mangoes weren't super popular there, largely because the guests have plastic forks and knives, which make it hard to cut this fruit. So on the days that I served breakfast and the kitchen happened to have mangoes around (unfortunately, very rare days), I felt no guilt at all about rescuing three or four mangoes and taking them home with me.  Much better than throwing them in the trash!

Arriving in Panama

One of the things that I was really, really (really) looking forward to during my time in Panama was eating fresh, locally grown mangoes, something I hadn't experienced for more than three decades. I was thrilled, therefore, when the assistant in my office showed me a mango tree just across the parking lot from our office. I had lucked out! 

Or at least I thought I had lucked out, but unfortunately, no. Lissette explained to me that as recently as a month ago, the ground beneath this particular tree had been littered with mangoes and mango carcasses, but the mango season was now over.  August had come; I had arrived in Panama; the mangoes were no more. When would they come back, I asked her? She wasn't sure, but a quick Internet search indicated that mango season started up again nine months later, in May, just as I would be leaving Panama.

Needless to say the fact that my stay in Panama coincided exactly with not-mango season kind of bummed me out.

Mangoes in the store

Three months after I got here, I moved just around the corner from a lovely open-air fruit stand where I can buy locally grown fruit (bonus: not wrapped in trash). Occasionally, this fruit stand has had mangoes imported from Colombia. Are Colombian mangoes local? Well, a little bit more than 100 years ago, Panama used to be part of Colombia. It's true that the mangoes have to make the trip here by boat (I'm assuming they did not come through the dangerous and hard-to-traverse Darien gap), but for my purposes, I was considering Colombia close enough to Panama to be local.

Now that it's April, though, there are more and more mangoes appearing in this market, and "local" is much more likely these days to mean "grown in Panama". The price is right, too: mangoes here are sometimes 10 for a dollar, sometimes five for a dollar, sometimes the price rises as high as two for a dollar. I can afford them.

Mangoes in the market.

Mangoes on the trees

Now that we're past summer (in Panama, "summer" means December to February, aka the "dry" season), and now that the rains have stuck their toes in the door and are thinking about moving back into the area for real, the mango trees are starting to bear fruit.

Mangoes along my walk.

A close-up of those mangoes, so high above my head.

More mangoes along my walk.

Mangoes that want to go play tennis.

Mangoes along the fence by my AirBnB.

It's hard to get more local than "go out in the yard".

For the most part, I don't see mangoes on the ground, though.

Behold: the ground beneath the mango tree is
blatantly mango-less.  Sigh.

In fact, I was going to say that I never see mangoes on the ground, alas, but as I was walking to the fruit market today I spied exactly that: a fallen mango.

It looks like an Easter Egg,
but I think it's actually an Easter Mango.
It was hot from being in the sun.  I rescued it.

Forget about "gold": I want to go to the place
where the streets are paved with mangoes.
I rescued this one, too.  Yes, I did.

Found food delights me, and I'm thrilled that my final month here is already starting to show promise for finding mangoes all around me.  It's a little bit like a dream come true.

Eating mangoes

My host bought a special "mango spoon".  It's very flat, for a spoon at least, although more curved than a knife, and it has a slightly serrated end. 

The bowl of this spoon is appropriately mango-sized,
and it's flat like the seed. 
It has tiny tiny little teeth at one end.

I've tried it, but I don't like it as much as the way I first learned to carve mangoes: 

• use a sharp knife to carefully cut out the middle seed (deliberately cutting away from myself so I don't inflict injury on anything except the mango), 
• then scoring each half in both directions, cutting through the fruit but not the rind, 
• and then turning the rind inside out so the fruit sticks out like the scales on a tortoise's shell.

Another view of today's mango tortuga. 
The seed is back by the knife, and on the right is 
a scored mango half ready to be flipped to become a second tortuga.
That was when I took the photo; by now, I already ate it all up!