Living for Disco

One of the things you never have to worry about in the UK is fresh food. Any vegetable, any fruit you could want or need is available, all year round, in staggering abundance.  Except perhaps for rhubarb, which is a crying shame.  Or a good thing for our health, depending on how you look at either rhubarb or the cultivation of fruit out of season.

Here, however, what’s in season very much dominates the supermarket shelves.  For most of the year, it’s impossible to find limes anywhere.  Making margaritas is a chore in this country, I can assure you.  Strawberries make a brief appearance as the weather warms up in September, but by mid-October they have fizzled out.  Avocados are like gold dust in winter.

When I arrived here in September of last year, one of the things I was most looking forward to was mangoes; juicy, sticky, blushing mangoes, with flesh the colour of late afternoon sunshine.  I asked someone in a supermarket in my first week, and he shook his head at me as if I was a mango short of a tropical fruit punch.  “No. No mangoes in Namibia” he said, and tried to move away from the crazy person.

“Will there be any soon?” I asked hopefully, fretfully, and was told that there would not. I think he was a bit worried that if he said ‘yes’ I might sit there in the fruit section until it started raining mangoes.  Fortunately, I found out that mango season does exist, and that you can’t move for the things come December.

So, I’ve been waiting, impatiently, for mangoes to start appearing the supermarkets, and yesterday I was rewarded. Somehow, the wait makes them more wonderful.

At the moment, the fruits are tiny, scarce and expensive.  Gradually, over the next few weeks, they’ll grow to the size of melons, and cost the equivalent of 20 pence.  The supermarket crates will be spilling over with the things, and I will be pureeing them, freezing them, making them into salads, sorbet, smoothies, cocktails (gin and fresh mango juice anyone?).  My chin will be perpetually smeared with mango.  Then, by March, they will have disappeared from whence they came, like the rain, or migrating birds - not to be seen until summer returns.

Here is a recipe for a mango salad that I made up (although it’s not particularly original), It does depend on the availability of limes, however, which is a pain in the pinny for me right now, because they haven’t made an appearance yet:

1 ripe mango, pitted
1 ripe papaya, seeded (keep the seeds)
½ an avocado
2 small red chillis, seeded
1 lump fresh ginger

For the dressing:

Olive oil (normal – the lighter the better)
Lime juice
Chilli oil

Slice the mango, papaya and avocado into slivers, or chunks, whichever you prefer.  Mix in a bowl.  Chop up the chillis very small, and scatter over the fruit (add seeds if you want it really hot).  Dice the ginger into tiny pieces and scatter over everything.  Mix.  If you like scatter some of the papaya seeds over the top.  They taste fresh and spicy, like watercress.

For the dressing, mix a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, a couple of teaspoons of chilli oil, and a couple of tablespoons of lime juice.  Add a pinch of salt.  Shake, and pour.

Eat.  Enjoy.  Try not to rub your eyes.