Guyanese Appetizer
MANGO CHUTNEY
4 green mangoes
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1 tablespoon cilantro
1 tablespoon lime juice
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1/2 teaspoon celery seed
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup white sugar
3 cloves garlic
2 Scotch bonnet peppers or 4 serrano peppers
1 medium onion
1 teaspoon ginger
1 1/2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
PREPARATION
Peel, seed, and cut off fleshy part of mangoes. Seed peppers. Mince garlic, onion, and peppers.
(For goodness sake, wash your hands thoroughly after handing hot peppers especially the blazing hot Scotch bonnets. And NEVER touch your face or any sensitive parts of your body while handling these peppers. You’ll be ready to confess to anything until the pain goes away.)
Put everything in a blender and blend at the “liquefy” setting until the mixture is completely smooth. Put in refrigerator overnight.
Next day, boil the chutney mixture until it thickens. Chutney goes with almost anything Caribbean. It’s also popular in England.
TIDBITS
1) Guyana is made up of ten administrative regions; Region 1, Region 2, Region 3, Region 4, Region 5, Region 6, Region 7, Region 8, Region 9, and Region 10.
2) Whoa!
3) Julius Caesar started his famous work, De Bello Gallico, with “All Gaul is divided into three parts.”
4) His close friend Brutus later assassinated him. Latin students today hate Julius Caesar because they are forced to read about his Gallic adventures.
5) Perhaps that’s what the authors of all those terribly dry websites had in mind when describing the “fun” facts of Guyana. After all, no one wants to be assassinated by friends and hated by students for centuries.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.