Thinking Allowed: Mangoes for breakfast

Australian mangoes are the best. They are ‘I-want-to-become-a-permanent-resident’ good. While the mangoes in Montreal were sometimes sold three for a dollar, they were sickly pruny-skinned ataulfos with lingering motion sickness from their ocean voyage. Here we get plump healthy mangoes which reveal brilliant yellow succulence at the touch of a knife. When they ripen, they just become soft-smoothie-ready rather than brown.

Saturday morning we crowded round the kitchen table in our Broulee, NSW holiday home to conduct that best of all experiments, the Blind Mango Taste Test. Tamar had carefully skinned and diced four gems: a Calypso, a Honey Gold, a Kensington Pride, and an R2E2. With the stickers concealed on the bottoms of the bowls, we were faced with four glowing bowls of golden Anacardiaceae and dug in. The results were striking: Honey Gold was the clear winner, tangy and firm, followed by R2E2 a nose ahead of Kensington Pride, with Calypso’s unmemorable flavour coming last place (unless you are Sophia and Tova and then it came in first). R2E2 were the clear winners for best mango to feed a large family. And so we learned that our love of fruit with the words 'honey' or 'gold' in their names holds true for mangoes too. Well worth the effort as we have several weeks of mango season left to double down on Honey Golds.

Our weekend wasn’t all mangoes. We explored the sealines of Mossy Point and Broulee Beach. Walking back from an excursion to Broulee Island, Aurora skipped backwards, digging her heels in with each jump, and ended up etching a zigzag line in the sand that was between 2 and 3 km long. Sophia rescued Zadie from a giant spider crawling down her back on the beach. Tova found a perfect purple conch shell. Tamar and I did a fiendish binary sort of Sudoku that we eventually cracked thanks to some clever labeling. I read a third of my ‘atmospheric’ Japanese crime horror thriller mystery, which Tamar correctly predicted would not buoy my spirits. We played a board game called Kids vs Parents which was horribly skewed due to Team Parents not watching enough TV. Sophia agreed to do a triathlon in exchange for The Secret Garden. Tova got mittens for Canada. We all got to gawk at quilts during the Braidwood Festival.

It was really nice to just spend a weekend as a family. My back has flared up a lot recently and this was our first outing together in a long time. Bateman’s Bay is just the perfect way to relax as a family and take it super easy yet come home feeling like we had a special weekend.