Some Mango Memories!

Do you have some sweet mango memories related to your childhood?
If you are born and brought up in a Keralite village, the answer will be definitely yes.Here is the mango season arrived and there are lots of sweet memories going through the mind while seeing raw mangoes falling in the courtyard.The wind was little hasty, so mangoes fell down with branches many times..
What was the easiest way to eat some raw mangoes? Take a clean cloth, (most of the time it was a bath towel, that was stolen from the ayal/ rope used to dry clothes) put mango and salt in that (if you have chilly powder,then it too),hold all the sides of cloth together and make it like a cover, just hit on the walls or trees many times using all your strength, slowly open the cloth, you get crushed pieces of raw mango mixed with salt!
Let me take breath... :) This was the mostly eaten dish by us during child hood if it was mango season. The most important thing was that we didn't need anybody's permission to make this since the ingredients were easily available.
The other dish, was little more hard to make, as kids it was difficult for us to cut mangoes with a knife. Any way the bigger children in the group did this work. Getting all the ingredients were not easy, but we managed to get each item from different houses.We chopped mangoes as small pieces (kothi ariyuka), mixed it with chopped small onions,green chillies, red chilly powder, salt and coconut oil. The aroma was super, still I can't resist eating it!
The method was different for each places, some added curry leaves and some added vinegar. Once when I prepared it , just to show my girl how were we used to make them. Then hubby said, they kept the mixture in the sun for some time "to set", or some times added hot "kanjivellam" in that.He took all mango mixture with plain rice that time.
It brought about the pleasant pictures of my class mates, who came home once while coming back after attending a friend's marriage.We all about 7 girls finished one horlicks jar of this mango mixture together in one sit.. :) Every one loves it, if it is a kid or an adult.
This is not a pickle and not kept for next day. It should be eaten fresh.
The large leaf in the picture, which I served this mango is the leaf of "podi ayni", which is a plant that grows here with coconut trees.In olden times,(before plastic age) it's large leaves used to carry things by foding the leaves carefully.People especially workers in the land used it to carry and eat food, or to cover meat or fish etc.
There are some more "mango specials" like manga chammanthy,manga curry, manga achar and manga tholi or manga thol (mango pieces dried in sun), uppu manga etc... Hope to post them later, Insha Allah..



Ingredients
Raw / green mango 2 medium size
shallots / chuvannulli 10
green chillies 2 or more
red chilly powder 2 tsp or as desired
coconut oil 1 or more Tbsps
salt



How I prepared
Chop mangoes with skin. Chop finely.Cut other ingreidients too. Mix magoes with them. Add chillie powder , salt and coconut oil.



A podi ayni tree near house.