I think I've seen some culinary customs so outlandish that I'm unimpressive. Just to name a few horrible spectacles that I experienced in my childhood: children who opened a hole in the bread with their fingers and poured a soda into it, obtaining a kind of dripping and sticky cake that they devoured with delight. Also when I accompanied my daughter and her cousin to MacDonald's and watched in horror as they dipped the fries into the ice cream.
And although I grew up in a home with good Caribbean cooking on my father's side, as you know, this cuisine loves baroque, mixes and spices, my palate doesn't dare with some things.
Today I will tell you one of those things that I find strange, but also charming and I have a very recent coffee story.
This is Nadima. She is a professor at my university, Universidad de Oriente, and has been the director of a postgraduate program in Education and has held some other positions of great responsibility. I met her when I took a Portuguese course with her. Nadima is a wonderful and musical teacher, and was able to deal with my poor hearing.
I told her that I was writing in my blog about coffee, and then she invited me to have coffee at this place called Caripe Café, which I have been to twice now in great company. The coffee here is extraordinary and I will tell you about it as soon as I get the chance.
We were talking about coffee and what I was writing about. Basically I told her that I was writing about my tastes around coffee and I told her that there was a whole community writing about coffee, and that there were very friendly people there and that some of them were really coffee tasters.
We were chatting amicably about these things when Nadima brought out the mango. You read that right.
"You know what I love to do during this mango season?" she tells me as he places the mango on the table: "Drink my morning coffee with a few slices of green mango." And she laughs her wide, full, musical laugh.
She tells me that she finds the acid in the fruit a good combination with her coffee. She also likes to drink it with ripe mango, but she likes it better with green mango.
The beautiful mango in the photograph comes from the courtyard of Nadima's house. It is a huge and beautiful tree.
Nadima brought that mango in her bag, the first fruit of her tree this season to give it to me. She knows I love all trees.
The coffee thing made two beautifully crowned anecdotes fit together.
Now I have the duty to try this combination that doesn't appeal to me at all.... However, why not?
The pictures were taken by me with my RedmiNote9 cell phone.