Mango Madness

I love this time of year here in Rurutu, even though we're technically in the tropics we have two quite different seasons a 'cold' and a 'hot' season. As we're in the southern hemisphere now is the 'hot' season, or rather the 'fruit/flower' season. It's all relative, we have banana, limes and papaya all year round, but now we have mangoes, pineapples, avocado, passion fruit and lychees all starting to get ripe, we also grow a lot of watermelon, as opposed to the potatoes, carrots and cabbage grown in the 'cold' season. My absolute favourite fruit is mango, and in fact I'm finding it hard living here where mango is only available once a year, in Moorea there are two fruiting seasons a year - so you can just eat as much mango as you like! And it's the same for pineapples, which are grown fairly intensively in Moorea - mainly to sate the appetite of the pineapple juice factory on the island. Since we now live on a tiny island there are no fruit or vegetable markets to speak of, we grow most of our own fruit and veggies, so it's not always easy to buy things like mangoes. Last year I really didn't make the most of it, so I have been promising myself to really make an effort to take advantage of the mango fest this year, there are three huge mango trees a few kms up the road from our home and I've been making a point to stop there every couple of days and clean up the spoils, it's still a little bit early yet, but there's still enough fruit for me to get going with some of my plans.

The mangoes fall all over the place, so I've been diving into thickets of Lantana, picking up a fair few scratches on the way, but I just love gathering food, it's immensely satisfying to be able to use what nature has to offer and it reminds me of when I used to go picking blackberries off the mountain-side as a child.

Today I made a spicy mango syrup:
(recipe taken from the Mongo Mango Cookbook by Cynthia Thuma)

• 4 small greenish mangoes (the variety I have here are very small, the recipe asks for two medium mangoes)
• 3 cups water (750ml)
• 1 cup sugar
• 3 cinnamon sticks
• 1 tsp. whole allspice
• 6 whole cloves

Peel and coarsely chop the mangoes, add to a pan with all the rest of the ingredients, bring to a boil and simmer for ~40min, until the mixture begins to thicken. Strain the sauce to remove the spices then return the fruit pulp to the sauce. Pour sauce into a glass jar.
Keep refrigerated. Delicious on crepes with home-made vanilla ice-cream.