Mangos

As Fritz has mentioned in his recent posts, we’ve finally established a routine once again. While we are enjoying early bedtimes, cooking for ourselves, working in the library, and morning swims, we have much less fodder for exciting blog posts accompanied by vivid pictures.

We buy most of our fruit from a family store on our street. Each night we stop for papaya, mangos, bananas, and any veggies we might need for our various weekly rice cooker creations. The owner of the shop commutes down to Marikina’s wet market each morning and selects produce and meat to sell back at her storefront that day. We (mainly Fritz) impressed them early on with attempts at ordering our groceries in broken Tagalog. We quickly escalated beyond basic phrases such as ‘magandang gabi,’ ‘salamat po,’ ‘magkano?’ and ‘kumasta ka?’ (good evening, thank you, how much, how are you) to attempted Tagalog explanations of jazz music in cabarets. A few weeks ago, Emma, the owner, started buying us different fruits she didn’t typically stock for her customers. She knows we love mangos and has introduced us to the baby, speckled, and green varieties. Her fruit gifts come by the dozens, and as much fruit as we consume here, we can’t eat it all in one evening. Fritz does most of the mango processing and experimented with refrigerating the extra slices of mango from Emma.

Yum.

We are both in agreement that chilled chunks of Filipino mangos are one of the most delicious foods on the planet.  A ripe slice of cold mango tastes like the best mango sorbet you could dream up.  It’s like an all-fruit semifreddo.  For all of the grit of Manila, the guidebooks do say that the mangos here really are the best in the world.  We would have to agree.

Here's a beautiful sunset picture Fritz captured last night around 6pm.