Meat or Fruit?

It's never a good sign when your dessert dish looks like fried chicken.  I didn't think fried food could be messed up so easily.  Let me explain.  Today I ventured into trying to cook fried mango fritters, which are suppposedly from Tanzania according to the cookbook.  However, Kenyans, who don't live all that far from Tanzania, have never heard of this.  I think someone made it up.  That should have been my first warning sign.  Anyway, I retract my previous statement that all the recipes in the book are easy, especially now that I've been glancing through the Asian section.  I think I'm going to have to call for back up assistance with those dishes because they have lots of ingredients and require yeast...something that gives me trouble.  I tried making homemade bread a few weeks ago, and it would never rise correctly.  it was the most dense loaf of bread ever.  I told Aquila she wasn't allowed to offer it to any of our guests.

The mango recipe should have been easy though.  It's just breaded fruit.  How hard can it be?  I think something's wrong with the recipe because the batter was sticky and goupy.  I even tried it twice with no improvement.  It was all I could do to get a little breading to stick to the mango.  And after I fried them it looked like a plate of chicken fingers staring back at me.  I was ready to get out the honey mustard sauce.

The other significant problem is that I think it's nearly impossible to find a quality mango in this country.  They don't exist (except for one or two rare times I've bought them).  Mostly I've completely given up on trying to buy them.  There's something wrong when the fruit is soft and "ripe" and yet still green colored.  I didn't like mangoes at all until I went to Kenya, and that's because all the ones I had here were never ripe.  I actually initially thought they were kind of sour.  Isn't sad that in America I think the frozen mangoes taste better than fresh ones?  The ones I bought today I had to completely dissect to cut out some strange brown marks in the middle.  I thought it was rotten, but it didn't taste like it. 

The verdict: just eat a regular mango....in Kenya or another country that grows them.  And seriously, don't fry them.