Just Another Meatless Monday -- Fruit Salsa

I love adding fruit for a touch of natural sweetness to salads and other dishes. The idea for this salsa came from a Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives show that featured a Jamaican woman's restaurant. She combined mangoes and red and yellow bell peppers, plus hot pepper, to make a salsa. But the recipe wasn't on the Food Network website. So I played around with the ingredients that I remembered.

The first batch I made, last week, was far too hot -- I used a half of a habanero pepper. I tasted the pepper first and it was hot, but I didn't think the heat would overwhelm everything else the way it did. This time, I only used about one eighth of a habanero, and I ended up adding some Sriracha sauce to increase the heat. I'd rather have to increase the heat than wish I'd used less hot pepper. Also, I had purchased the mangoes that day, and they were not fully ripe. In fact, they were pretty sour, so I didn't add any lime juice at all. I ate that batch over brown basmati rice and black beans, and it was good, but not what I had planned in my mind.

So I tried again today. I purchased the mangoes several days in advance and let them ripen on the kitchen counter. They were juicy and sweet this time. Here's a good video on how to slice and dice a mango, if you've never done it.

I'm still playing around with this recipe, and I look forward to trying different combinations of fruits and vegetables to make salsas. I tried to create a balance of sweet, sour, and hot, and added some fish sauce for umami. Herbs -- maybe mint or cilantro -- would be good, too. I ate this over some chili vegetable stew (made from the vegetable stew template from a few weeks ago) for lunch today. Here's what I did:

2 ripe mangoes, diced
1 red bell pepper, diced
1 yellow bell pepper, diced

juice of 1 lime
juice of 1/2 orange
1 tablespoon maple syrup
1 tablespoon fish sauce
1/8 habanero pepper
a good amount of grated ginger root
a good squeeze of Sriracha hot sauce

I put the first 3 ingredients in a bowl. I buzzed the rest of the ingredients (except the Sriracha) in the blender. For some reason, the habanero did not puree, so I fished it out and cut it into little pieces. After tasting the sauce, I added a good squeeze of Sriracha for added heat and flavor, then poured the liquid over the diced mangoes and peppers. That's it! Put it in the fridge and let the flavors mingle, then serve over rice, beans, veggies -- whatever -- for added sweetness and heat.