Another Joe's Manic Mango Salsa - nom nom nom

Several years ago my daughter-in-law went to get some groceries for a get together with my sons and their wives. They talked about the things they wanted, the food they'd be making and made a list of what they wanted.

She took care of it for all of us, and did a great job. But she made a slight mistake. As my older son was getting ready to make his favorite guacamole recipe, he couldn't find the avocado. When his sister-in-law was asked, she said, "Yes I did", and pointed at the mango.

Heh, no worries. While we didn't get guacamole, I was excited to see that she'd gotten the mango. A lot of the ingredients are the same as for my mango salsa, a sort of pico de gallo with mangoes.

Ingredients are pretty simple and available in most stores. Really, the only special ingredient is the mango itself. I like to add an avocado, but it's not necessary. You will notice a difference though.

Ingredients include:

1. Mango
2. Cracked pepper
3. Fresh garlic
4. Tomatoes
5. Himalayan salt
6. Oregano
7. Avocado
8. Chives
9. Onion
10. Lime
11. Cilantro
12. Jalapeños
13. @papa-pepper's ghost pepper

---

Cut half the onion, the jalapeños and the ghost pepper into small enough pieces to put in a chopper, and toss in the garlic as well. If you don't have a chopper, no biggie. You'll just need to chop these up pretty fine. If you do have a chopper, blend these up pretty well. You'll want to hold back a little of the onion to put in gradually to help move the peppers around as they get smaller.

If you like chunks of jalapeños in your salsa, hold back a few so you can dice rather than blend them. You probably don't want to do that with the reaper though!

I can't tell you how many peppers to use. This is subjective, as are most aspects of any recipe. You'll have to decide based on how hot your peppers are and your own tolerance to heat.

Chop up the other half of the onion into small pieces. This will had a nice chunky texture to the salsa.

Put all the ingredients into a bowl, add the spices (Himalayan salt, cracked pepper and oregano) and squeeze the lime on top. The lime adds a wonderful fresh flavor and also serves as a preservative. I almost always include lime in my salsa, especially when making a chunky one like pico de gallo. Let it soak a bit as you turn to the other ingredients.

The easiest way I've found to cut up a mango is to put slits in the flesh while it still has the skin attached, like in this picture. Do this for both sides, making the blocks of mango whatever size you prefer. This is a keitt mango, which is the largest variety I've ever seen.

After you've gotten the cuts in place, press a glass between the flesh and the skin at one end. It might be a bit firm, but, unless it's not ripe yet, you should be able to get it started. Then just slide the skin over the edge of the glass, allowing the mango chunks to drop to the bottom. The next thing you know, you have a glass of mango chunks!

Avocados can be done the same way, though I usually just use a spoon to scoop them out once I've put the slits in them. Dice your tomatoes now, and put all three ingredients together. When I made this batch, I was really short on tomatoes, as you can see.

As noted already, the avocado isn't really necessary. But they serve a few great purposes. Of course, they're great for you. Avocado tends to take on the flavors of whatever it's mixed with and the fat helps it hang on the palete, so it's a great ingredient in many recipes.

Put all these ingredients into a bowl, then chop up the chives and cilantro and add them.

As I noted earlier, I was short on tomatoes. If I had realized how short I was, I would have only used half of the other ingredients. The massive size of the keitt mango threw me off too.

As much as I hated to, I opened a small can of tomatoes and added it to the salsa. It doesn't hurt the flavor, I just prefer fresh ingredients as much as possible. And there's always the concern regarding industrial produce hanging over our heads.

You can see the difference here after I added the canned tomatoes. It's prettier in the first one, but really needs more tomatoes. This fresh look would have been even nicer with more fresh tomatoes. But, we do what we can do, and I really didn't want to go to the store for a few tomatoes.

And, here you are. The finished product.

This batch made about a quart-and-a-half to two-quarts. Usually I end up with about a quart, when using the smaller mangoes.

We don't keep gmo chips around, so I really didn't have anything to dip. But that didn't stop me. After sauteing some onion and bell peppers, I put in a little (grass fed) ground beef and added some cracked pepper. This was put in a bowl with a very liberal portion of the mango salsa on top.

How'd it turn out? The ghost pepper left it a little hotter than usual, but with the added bulk of the mango and extra tomatoes I had to include, I think it was dampened. For my tastes, this turned out just right. I think a little more cilantro might have been nice, but wasn't necessary.

As mentioned earlier, I don't include amounts of each ingredient for this recipe. In my opinion, it makes us too robotic and stifles our creativity. And there are too many variables to get consistent results. These include the heat of the peppers, size of vegetables, personal tastes and maybe even available ingredients. Improvise and make it fit your context and preferences. Make it your own.

Enjoy!!

Steemin' on,
Another Joe

Email notifications
AJ Facebook
AJ Twitter

AAC Facebook
AAC Twitter