Hi, Hivers!

I hope everyone is healthy and enjoying some happy juices :)

Since I returned to Hive, I've been trying to learn, to understand the changes; I've also felt happy and welcomed by my fellow Hivers, including the moderators, who I consider warm and committed people. For this and more, I am delighted to be participating in the First Amazing Drinks Contest, precisely because it's a "first" in which I can participate. Nice! Thank you so much, @sirenahippie, for hosting this beautiful community 🥤❤️

There are still some hours to join the contest. I hope my friends @andresromero and @morenaluna can participate 😃

We are very fortunate to have a huge mango tree in our front yard.

This morning, when I went to pick up the mangoes that had dropped down, this little guy almost knocked me out, but he's now in a better place.

For a couple of weeks now, the mangoes have started to ripen and drop. We are filling bags and giving them away to family and friends every other day; also, we are eating them like crazy. What makes me remember...

I keep beautiful memories of mangoes. When I was a child, I used to climb up mango trees in our grandfather's family vacation house by the river. My cousins and I plucked them and threw them down for others to catch them. We filled so many buckets...

2015 and 2016 were very difficult years in my country; the economic crisis was definitely a bitter juice for the long fast. But sweet and fleshy mangoes hung on the trees, a golden treasure under the sun of my dear Cumana (my hometown). Mother Nature offered them to us as a gift. There's something beautifully romantic in adversity and poverty, but only from a distance, I think. The philosophies that bring us barefoot to the feet of the mango tree, armed with sticks, stones, greedy hands and rapacious eyes are perhaps the same ones that keep us enraptured, like swimming in a pool of sweet juice.

During those difficult days, our fruit trees in the back and front yards--the house is huge--took on a new value; moreover, they seemed to try harder to bear fruit: Malaysian apples, lemons, mangos and passion fruit, tons of them. It was like they new we needed all the help we could get. We used the mangoes and Malaysian Apples to reduce the tanginess of the lemon and passion fruit so that we could make better use of all that nature had to offer. The fruit ripened quickly on the trees and fell to the ground; in the midst of such abundance, we discovered how to take advantage of the very ripe mangoes to enrich and sweeten many preparations: desserts with rice, stews, lemonades, and many others, among which we discovered one that to this day is one of our great favorites: ripe mango and passsion fruit colada. I'm talking about a thick juice we prepare only with the help of a strainer and a spoon to help the pulp go through the mesh.

The sweet taste of ripe mango is an excellent substitute for sugar in many preparations. However, we must remember that even when it comes from the fruit, sugar should be consumed with caution, especially if there are insulin-related problems in your family.

Besides being super delicious and high in fiber and in sugar, mangoes contain more than 20 vitamis and minerals. Mango is a superfood. I really like that they are high in beta-carotene, so if you eat them often--like one serving every day--, you'll have better hydrated and beautifully tanned skin; plus, mangoes are a food that sustains you for hours, help your body control cholesterol, which is so good for the health of our heart; besides, we should know that in our bodies, beta-carotene becomes vitamin A, which betters our eyesight and nervous system. Sometimes, mangoes and a hug are all you need 😁

About passion fruit... It's possible that my most relevant memory of passion fruit is the many warnings that my grandmother used to make about never eating its seeds, because "you could develop cancer"; however, life takes many twists and turns, and today it seems that the opposite is the true. I confess that I only eat a few seeds or none, for fear that the ghost of my grandmother will appear to me. Passion fruit is high in antioxidants, necessary to prevent premature aging of our tissues; as we can probably guess, this fruit is also high in vitamin C--one of the "classic" vitamins, which many are on the lookout for if it's flu season or if there's an outbreak of Covid--. It's also an important source of potassium, good for the kidneys, heart, muscles and nervous system; and calcium, for strong bones and teeth.

Oh, but how tangy it is! And how wrong it is for you to spoil this wonderful fruit by adding sugar. How about adding bananas or mangoes?! Or just embrace the musky sweet & tart side of life!

Mango pulp, 3 cups
Passion fruit, seedless, 1 1/2 cups
Passion fruit pulp for decoration, 2 tablespoons
Ice cubes to taste

1- Cut the passion fruit in two halves with a sharp knife.

2- Scoop out the pulp from each half with a spoon. Avoid the white membrane that envelops the pulp (mesocarp), as it produces an unpleasant bitterness that won't add any desirable effect to our colada--not this time.

3- Separate the pulp from the seeds in a strainer. If you have a hard time trying to do it, you can help yourself with the blender, giving it a couple of strokes to get the juice without breaking the seeds. Then strain it.

Check the amount of passion fruit juice you have obtained to calculate how much ripe mango pulp you will need. For me, the ratio should be 1 to 2: 1 cup of passion fruit juice for every 2 cups of ripe mango pulp.

4- Peel and cut the flesh of the mangoes to obtain the amount of pulp you need.

Since I got a cup and a half of passion fruit juice, I stopped when I had scooped out 3 cups of mango pulp. I ate the rest! XD

Since the mangoes were very ripe, I finished squeezing out the pulp with my hands.

5- Press the mango pulp in the strainer to separate it from the bagasse.

You'll see how a thick and delicious juice comes out through the strainer mesh. You could consume it just like that, with just a little ice.

At this point, I must say that I almost never strain the mango pulp. At home we like to eat it whole or put the puree in the freezer and then eat it as an ice cream.