Mango Salsa

I have a nephew who can create, as opposed to just cook. (Me? The only creating I do involves errors and you just pray that I err on the side of good taste. Which I sometimes do and where my best ideas seem to come from.) So when The Nice Kid comes in last week and announces she's been invited to her friend's family's annual Mango Feast, I knew I had an IN.

My nephew originally created this to serve alongside fish at an upscale restaurant we used to have here. Now, we just make it in mass quantity, get out of the kids' way and hope there's enough for everyone.

J Miller's Mango Salsa

3 mangos diced
1 apple diced
1 onion diced
1 each of green and red bell dice
2 small tomatoes diced and seeded
1 fresh jalepeno seeded and diced
Generous amount of chopped cilantro
Garlic, salt, and pepper
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
Honey to taste

My dad is up at all hours of the night and he orders some weird stuff off late-night TV. And actually, some of them work. (Gorilla Glue was originally on paid programming.) One of the things he got me was one of those onion dicing box things...you raise up the lid, put your food on the metal dicing grid and push down the top. Beautiful little dices...and I put everything in this recipe through that dicer. It was so pretty! All the uniform little perfect squares...I'd be OCD except I can't get it right.

Then, of course, I didn't have any honey. We have beehives at the farm and that's where I usually get my honey...except there is some sort of little foreign mite destroying all the native honeybees and last year my dad let the mites get an advantage. You have to keep these small flaps, treated with a substance that destroys the mites, over the entrance to the hive. And everytime a bee brushes through it, the mites die. Sad state of affairs, especially when the bees were here FIRST.

ANYWAY. I didn't have honey so I used a teaspoon of molasses. It worked. The only complaint, as usual, was that there wasn't enough!