lifestyle

You should always peel a mango. You might get a very bad reaction if you eat or drink the somewhat toxic oils in the skin. You also don't want to try to put the seed in your mango smoothie. Your choice of mango is important, as they vary in flavor and texture. You want to use those sweet, juicy ones, fruit that are not too stringy.

Mango flesh, milk, ice cubes and sugar are the ingredients. The proportions need not be exact. How thick? How fruity? How sweet? These are variables that you alter by the amounts of the various ingredients you put in the blender.

If you want to cut calories, you can use an alternative sweetener for the sugar and skim rather than whole milk --- but understand that a mango has a lot of natural sugar and that will limit the extent that you can create a "diet" mango smoothie. (Let me put in a plug for an advertiser here, more for the benefit of calorie-conscious readers than for our esteemed client. Go to Organica in Paitilla and get a little plastic jar of stevia, an exceptionally powerful and almost no-calorie natural sweetener, of which a tiny little dab will substitute for a much larger volume of sugar. If you are living in Panama City and the quality of the food you consume matters to you, Organica is a place you want to get to know.)

And how much should you blend it? This is a smoothie! Everything has to be smooth, in one uniform mix. You want to set the blender on as high a setting as it goes. If you go a bit heavy on the ice, you may need to interrupt the blending to use a wooden spoon to push the still solid ingredients toward the bottom and then resume blending.