ingenuemuse and buckminster go on about the crazy things, and never ever having tried one myself, I decided to break down and buy a pair mangoes the other night while I was out stocking up on frozen "Budget Grommet" meals. Heck, living in the Central Valley ought to be good for something. It's not called America's Produce Basket for nothing. Sure enough, I was able to procure a couple of them. They've been sitting in my fruit bowl for a couple of days now, waiting for my curiosity.
Well, I finished my meal-in-a-box, and then I was ready to try out this weird fruit. I am a total mango virgin. I got one out of the bowl and checked it out. These things are weird. It was leaking a tiny drop of a syrupy sap-like liquid from the stem. Immediately, I recognized a problem. I had no idea what to do with one of these things. Can the skin be eaten, like an apple, or should I peel it? Should it be quartered or chopped into chunks, cored? I flirt with the idea of posting a question to the 
ask_muse community, but I know the person who is probably most knowledgeable on this subject is probably out or otherwise up to her eyebrows in some project for the evening. So, I improvise. When in doubt, experiment.
Basically, I attacked the thing with a knife and peeled it, and went after the meat of the fruit in whatever way seemed most efficacious. Gah, what an enormous pit these things have! I have decided that mangoes have a strange flavor. They taste a little like watermelon, with some kind of piney notes in it. There also seem to be some citrus-y notes in there too. They are kind of smooth and melt-in-your-mouth and fibrous and tough at the same time. Weird -- which explains why Muse likes them. Heh heh. They're sticky bastards too. The flavor's not bad, in my opinion. It's not something I'd want every night, and it's never going to displace strawberries as my favorite fruit, but mangoes do make a nice change of pace -- ha ha, welcome to the dessert of the real.
Fair warning, there are seven pics of a fool mangling a mango behind the cut. These are not for the faint of heart or the low of bandwidth.
Hey let's party, let's get down, let's turn the radio on,
This is the meltdown.
Get out the camera, take a picture,
The drag queens and the freaks
Are all out on the town.
And cowboy Jane's in bed
Nursing a swollen head.
Sunshine Sally and Peter Ustinov
Don't like the scene anyhow.
I dropped acid on a Saturday night
Just to see what the fuss was about.
Now there goes the neighborhood.
"There Goes The Neighborhood"
--Sheryl Crow
