Well, 'scuse us for being gringos. We saw those guys on the street corners in Miami hawking little green fruits in netted yellow baggies, but we didn't know what they were, so we bought some for $2. We took them out and smelled 'em. Nothing.
Instead of guessing and potentially poisoning ourselves, we sent a cell-phone pic of the purchase to a worldly buddy who responded via text: "Mamoncillo or mamones. Bahamians call them canep. Don't know a formal name." Turns out they have about a dozen different names.
To this, we responded, "Isn't mamón a dirty word?"
"Yeah, but that's not the same thing," he replied. (Urbandictionary.com, defined mamón as such: "In Mexican slang, it means something like 'insolent little douchebag,' 'absurd fuckhead,' or 'deliberately, and often arrogantly, uncooperative.'")
"OK, then, what do we do with these?"
Thankfully he invited us to his house so he could set us straight. Once we arrived and rinsed the little green globes off, he walked us through the process.
Step one: Chomp down with your incisors just hard enough to pierce the skin.
Step two: Peel away skins and discard.
Step three: Pop the orange critter in your mouth and work the lychee-like flesh off the pit with your tongue and teeth.
Step four: Discard pit and repeat.
This was certainly an entertaining process, but we couldn't get past the booger-y texture of the fruit, the decided lack of flavor, and the amount of labor involved. And no matter how hard we sucked, we just couldn't get all the freakin' meat loose. Yep, that's correct, these mamones were "deliberately and arrogantly uncooperative."
