The best homemade jam ever is ripe white peaches done half and half with mangoes, preferably the Champagne variety, which is to mangoes what Scharffenberger is to chocolate. Champagnes have a very short season and are long gone now, and so when I went looking for mangoes, I came home with these instead.
I haven’t made jam in several years. These might make me. There were six in the box. I ate the first mango, a little early, but quite good–took the whole day, and still, I had to call for reinforcements at dinnertime, and still, there were leftovers for awhile yet after that. It was the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival of mangoes at 2 2/3 pounds. That’s a proudly-large apple doing the cheerleader tower with it, not some shy little thing.
The kicker is that you know all five mangoes still in that box are going to go dead ripe all at once. Not a peach in sight. I think they’re going to be on their own, because, with the kids gone, so are we.