Tutti Fruitie?

I'm still among computers and internet, as I was yesterday, but yesterday I was too busy reading Little Bee, assisting with science experiments (by chewing bread and monitoring banana-flavored petri dishes), and trying to resuscitate nearly rotten mangoes to write anything. Plus other people needed a turn with the internet. (internet arrives in the form of a USB stick and is only available for the computer with that stick).

Perhaps you are curious and want to hear more about Little Bee: Little Bee is one of my new favorite books. I wish I weren't already on page 188 because it ends on page 271.

Perhaps you are curious and want to hear more about science experiments: I chewed bread until there was nothing left to chew, waiting and waiting for it turn sweet so that iodine dropped on top of it would not change blue. It always changed blue. I think I've got faulty saliva. The petri dishes were banana flavored because Trish couldn't find unflavored gelatin. Although doesn't gelatin come from animal hooves? We could make it the old-fashioned way!

Perhaps you are curious and want to hear more about resuscitated mangoes: I'd brought a bag of ripe mangoes with me to Basse, and the mangoes became successively more ripe, as mangoes tend to do, until they were very nearly like water balloons, except filled with sickly sweet mango juice. So I thought maybe I could peel and boil them and something would happen. But nothing did, so I added sugar. And still nothing happened, so I added lemon juice. And still nothing happened, so I poured the boiling mango/sugar/lemon juice concoction into cups and stuck them in the freezer, with the mindset that "at least they'll be something cold to eat." And hours later I pulled out the cups of slushy mango mixture and ate some. At least they were cold.

Perhaps you are curious and want to hear more about tutti fruitie. Yesterday for dinner I ate Navratan Kurma, which is “Vegetables and dried fruit cooked in a rich, creamy gravy—a dish fit for kings!” that came in a bag in a box with a promise of purity. Seriously, these Ready to Eat Indian meals are delicious. I bought this one a month ago and figured I should eat it soon because although it says it will last twelve months from manufacture, it also stays to store in an “ambient condition” and I am not sure how ambient the inside of my metal food trunk is. Can I say, just one more time, because I don't have a thesaurus: it was delicious. Additionally, the only ingredients I could not pronounce were Indian ones like “asafoetida” and “ajowan,” not ones that made me wish I remembered more high school chemistry. The box even has a nice little seal on it that says “Made with 100% Natural Ingredients.” And one of these natural ingredients was “tutti fruitie." I’ve never heard of tutti fruitie outside the context of rainbow-colored Baskin Robbins ice cream, so your curiosity will remain as unsatiated as mine.