Emergency Mango Update!

Plus: A Plea to Help Me Buy a $27 Mangosteen . . .

I may or may not have stolen some mangoes from this tree.

Hello, hungry people.

This is an urgent follow-up to the previous installment of Bob’s Diner in which I confessed to paying $14 for a delicious Valenciana mango at the local farmer’s market and $32 for four Keitt mangoes at Robert Is Here fruit stand in Homestead.

I heard from a lot of you about this. To condense all the comments into one: “Bob, you’re an idiot. Why pay so much money for mangoes when you can get 3 for $5 at Publix?”

To which I would answer: “Because, dammit, the mangoes they sell at Publix aren’t Florida mangoes.”

The mangoes at Publix and most other grocery stores come from Mexico, Brazil, Guatemala or Thailand. As mangoes go, they are tolerable. Better than no mangoes at all, I suppose. But they lack the oomph and the seductiveness of Florida mangoes, which don’t travel well.

Unless you are stealing them from someone’s backyard and are running like hell to make your escape. (Not that I speak from experience.)

Or when you pick them from your cousin Edith’s backyard in Miami and haul them home in your car, like these gorgeous specimens I scored a few years ago.

***

But not everyone is lucky enough to have a Cousin Edith. Or neighbors with trees that aren’t well guarded.

In which case, it is perfectly acceptable to buy inferior foreign mangoes at the grocery store and put them to their best use — mango bread. Cousin Edith comes to the rescue on that front, too.

COUSIN EDITH’S MANGO BREAD

This will make two 8 x 4 x 2-inch loaves. Do not feel compelled to share.

Ingredients
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon salt
3 eggs
¾ cup butter, softened
1 ¼ cups sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups chopped mango
½ cup shredded coconut (optional, but highly recommended)
¼ cup chopped walnuts (optional, but highly recommended)

Directions
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease and flour 2 loaf pans.

2. Sift together flour, baking soda, cinnamon and salt in a large bowl. Make a well in the center.

3. In a separate bowl, whisk together eggs, butter, sugar and vanilla extract. Fold mango, coconut and walnuts into the egg mixture. Pour that into the well of the flour and mix well. Pour batter into the prepared loaf pans and let sit for 20 minutes.

4. Bake in the over until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, about 1 hour. Cool in the pans for 10 minutes before removing to cool completely on a wire rack.

***

Thinking about mangoes also got me thinking about mangosteens.

If there’s one fruit that rivals mangoes, for me anyway, it’s mangosteens. Despite the names, the two are not related botanically. But aphrodisiacally they are siblings, capable of promoting desire, if not for horizontal boogieness, then certainly for desiring more of them to eat.

I first tasted a mangosteen in Vietnam a few years ago while roaming around a market in Ho Chi Minh City. That sounds a tad travel-boasty, doesn’t it? Apologies. But it was an exotic place and that mangosteen was the most exotic thing I’d ever eaten.

I won’t even attempt to describe what a mangosteen tastes like. I’ll leave that to David Fairchild, the famed botanist and plant explorer who spent the last years of his life in Florida and for whom Miami’s Fairchild Gardens is named.

"It is so delicate that it melts in the mouth like ice cream.,” Fairchild wrote. “The flavor is quite indescribably delicious. There is nothing to mar the perfection of this fruit, unless it be that the juice from the rind forms an indelible stain on a white napkin.”

Mangosteens ain’t bad to look at either. It’s like they are puckering up, just waiting for you to lay your lips on them.

***

But mangosteens are notoriously hard to cultivate. The only places in the U.S. where they grow are the extreme southern tip of Florida and a few parts of Hawaii. Meaning, they are also notoriously expensive.

Once I got thinking about mangosteens, I got wanting to eat some. And I found a place called Miami Fruit that grows mangosteens and will ship them to you. Here’s how much they cost.

Yes, $27! For a single mangosteen, a mangosteen about the size of a tennis ball that is being held by someone with dirty fingernails.

That’s a ridiculous price to pay, isn’t it?

But I must have one.

And that’s why I am asking you, the patrons of Bob’s Diner, people who appreciate ridiculousness, to help me buy one.

Here’s the deal: If you want to pitch in to help me raise $27, then send me a private message and I will connect you to my Venmo account. There’s probably a way to add a link here to my Venmo account, but I don’t trust my ability to do that, so just send a message and we’ll go from there.

You can donate as much as you want — $1, $5, the whole $27. Once I’ve hit the goal, I’ll order the mangosteen from Miami Fruit and file a full report on Bob’s Diner about how delicious it was (or maybe wasn’t, who knows?)

Not only that, but if you contribute to this ridiculous cause, I will mention you by name in boldface in the mangosteen installment of Bob’s Diner (first name and last initial only.) And if I’m feeling particularly generous then I just might send you something cheap and stupid and random in the mail as part of Bob’s Diner’s ongoing crusade to bankrupt Jeff Bezos.

So, be foolish. Help me get a $27 mangosteen:

What happens if y’all donate more than $27?

I’ve thought about that. And I’m thinking I would really-really like to sample a Taiyo No Tamago (“Egg of the Sun”) mango, the most expensive mango in the world. They’re grown in Japan. And at an auction a couple of years ago, a pair of them sold for $4,000!

So anything over $27 will go towards helping me buy one of those babies. It doesn’t get more ridiculous than that. I’m salivating already.

Thanks for dropping by. See you back here soonish …