The first Haden of the season hit the roof of our screened patio around 3 a.m. one night in late May, with a thump loud enough that Dana sat straight up in bed and asked if somebody was on the roof. Nobody was. It was a mango, a pound of it, and within a week they were coming down every night.
I'm finishing this at a picnic table in North Georgia, where it was 61 degrees at 7 this morning and nobody has seen a mango in five days. The drive up had its own excitement, which gets its own post. But before we left on the 13th, the tree gave us more fruit than four people can eat, so here's where it went.
The tree
The tree was here long before we were. Our best guess is that the original owners planted it not long after the house was built in 1978. It's a Haden, the old South Florida standard: red and yellow skin with a green blush, about the size of a grapefruit, sweet with a little tang and a few strings near the seed. It's taller than the house, so most of the fruit is out of reach and a lot of it comes down on its own. Some years the tree barely bothers. This year it went all in.
Maya keeps a tally on the whiteboard on our fridge. The morning we left, it said 137, not counting the ones the squirrels and one very bold iguana got to first. By day the patio smelled like ripe mango. By late afternoon it smelled like ripe mango plus fruit flies.
I pick what I can reach with a long pole that has a wire basket on the end, and I wear gloves and long sleeves to do it. Two summers ago the sap gave me an itchy rash up both forearms, and once was enough.
Where 137 mangoes go
- Straight from the tree. Breakfast, lunch, after school. Nico eats his on the back step, cut into the crosshatched cheeks the kids call hedgehogs, with juice running to his elbows.
- Mango bread. More on that below. Dana baked four loaves and took two to work.
- Batidos at Marisol's. Dana's mom blends mango with milk, ice and a little sugar. Nico ranked hers above the Robert Is Here milkshake, which is the highest praise he has.
- Frozen chunks for camp. Six bags went into the RTIC on top of our freezer dinners, where they worked as ice for the first two days and as a snack after that.
- The neighbors. Isabela's family next door gets a bag every few days. She feeds Pickles while we're away, so she's on mango duty this week too: anything that drops is hers.
- Ron and Linda. A full grocery bag rode up to Ocala with us. Linda had a mango salsa going before we finished unloading the Pilot.
Dana's mango bread
It's her banana bread with mango swapped in, and I think it's better. Roughly:
- 2 cups flour, 1 teaspoon baking soda, 2 teaspoons cinnamon and a pinch of salt
- 3 eggs, 3/4 cup oil and 1 cup sugar, whisked together
- 2 cups diced, very ripe mango folded in last, plus whatever juice is on the cutting board
- One greased loaf pan, 350 degrees, about an hour, until a knife comes out clean
The top cracks and goes dark, and the inside stays moist, almost like pudding where the mango pockets are. Wrapped in foil it keeps for days, which is why two loaves came camping. One was gone before we crossed into Georgia.
Freezing it for camp
We slice the two cheeks off either side of the seed, score them, cut the cubes away from the skin and spread them on a sheet pan so they freeze separately. Two hours later they go into freezer bags, pressed flat, and they stack in the cooler just like the dinners do. On our first warm afternoon here, the kids ate half-thawed mango cubes straight out of the bag at the picnic table and declared it the best thing about Georgia, which is a little unfair to Georgia.
Isabela texted last night: a photo of a bucket of fallen mangoes on our patio, and two question marks. I wrote back, "All yours." She answered with a picture of Pickles sitting next to the bucket, looking like he'd done the picking himself.
