Beryl raged through the Windward Islands on July 1, 2024 as a powerful category 4 hurricane, and, although the eye of the storm didn’t pass directly over Bequia, we certainly got more than our fair share of ferocious wind! Nik and I stood and watched boats dragging anchor as gusts blew though Admiralty Bay, grateful that we no longer have vessels to worry about. The wind was horrific, exceeding 100 MPH at times, and would leave extensive damage in its wake.
The trees in our front yard bent back and forth as the wind gusts howled; a lovely old jacaranda tree was up-rooted, falling on top and crushing a young avocado tree that had just started to bear. The lovely frangipani tree planted by Mac in 1990 lost its lovely blooms along with a few limbs, but miraculously survived. The majestic mango tree began to drop young fruit at a steady clip, and this saddened me a lot more than the loss of the jacaranda tree. The mangos from that particular tree have always provided us with a year’s worth of fruit for our morning smoothies, fruit that we cut, scoop and freeze each season to ensure that we never run out. I’m relieved that the tree itself survived the storm, but we lost hundreds of mangos thanks to Beryl.
The morning after the storm breakfast smoothies weren’t an option with no electricity, so I decided to make fruit muffins with mangos that would otherwise be fed to the goats. I chopped up the ripest fruit in a bowl, then assembled the following:
In a small bowl mix:
2 cups white flour
2/3 tsp. salt
¼ cup sugar
3 tsp. baking powder
In a large bowl whisk together;
¼ cup melted butter
2 eggs
1 cup milk
Add the wet ingredients to the dry with a few strokes of a spatula, folding chopped mango into the batter. Stir just enough for the ingredients to bind, too many strokes will make the muffins tough. Spoon the batter into greased and floured muffin tins and bake at 350 degrees for 25 minutes.
These mango muffins are easy to make and a treat to eat, perhaps not as good (or as healthy!) as our morning smoothies but certainly better than nothing at all! At present we have no idea how long the island’s power will be out, but I have a feeling we’ll be eating hurricane muffins for several mornings thanks to Beryl’s fierce winds.