Want a mango cocktail?

Remember those mangos that attacked us daily one summer at the office? And how we had decided to take our revenge by eating as many of them as possible?

(If you don’t, you absolutely need to click here.)

Well, one Friday afternoon, we decided to take our revenge even further. The day had been long and dull. We all needed a little pick me up.

The tree was full of ready-to-eat mango kòn. Having sucked so many of them through the days, we knew those mangos were deliciously juicy.

On a whim, we decided that it was time to extract all that juice, and make some cocktails.

We sent someone to fetch some Haitian rum and key limes. Besides the mango kòn, which we already had, they were key ingredients for our cocktail to be successful.

In the meantime, we decided to work on the mango kòn juice. Not once did we think that they call mango kòn ‘mango tòtòt’ for a reason.

We ignored the fact that, all summer long, we had been eating them without cutting the flesh with a knife. We also seemed to forget that none of those mangos had been near a knife at all, not even to be peeled. We had used our teeth to remove the skin off of dozens of mango kòn before biting into their flesh.

Yet, that didn’t ring any bells. Armed with a knife, we peeled those mangos. Once we had gotten rid of their skins, we tried to cut through the flesh. Our goal was to put the pulp in a blender to prepare the juice that would be the base of our mango cocktail. Or so we thought.

It took us about a good six mangos before we realized, and finally accepted, that the pulp would never detach from the fruits’ core. We would not get our juice.

We had to face reality. Without that juice, there wouldn’t be a mango kòn cocktail either.

But we were not ready to give up on our mango cocktail. We had already bought that rum and those key limes. We absolutely could not let them go to waste.

We did not want just a lime-flavored cocktail, however. We wanted a cocktail we had never prepared before. We needed to try and see if mangos would work.

Determined to have a mango-flavored cocktail at all cost, one of us went on a hunt for mango fransik. We knew those mangos would not fail us. After all, mango fransik and mango batis are two mango varieties that Haitians most definitely eat with a knife.

As soon as we received them, we happily cut the fruits and extracted their juice in our blender before straining them.

With the pulp of just two of those mango fransik, our first homemade mango cocktail was born. It was as delightful as we had anticipated.

That mango cocktail brightened what would otherwise have remained a dull Friday afternoon.

And for that, I will forever be grateful for the existence of mango fransik.