OUR COCONUT HARVEST

Coconuts are an important crop here, and they are used in every day food preparation. We have a half acre property with some coconut trees on it, and have recently harvested around 250 coconuts. I thought you might be interested in what we do with them.

They are seperated into 2 categories - the "buko" which are young coconuts and the "niyog" which are mature coconuts. You tell the difference by shaking them (not the color.) If you can hear the liquid inside, it is a mature "niyog." The color does not indicate what they are.

The "buko" is often used for making "buko" salad - a sweet desert. The buko are first cut open on the side and the juice saved. The juice is supposed to be good for kidney and bladder problems. (The gold colored ones have a sweeter juice.) Below you can see my trust "bolo" (machete to you) and a couple of buko on the left that I have cut open (yes, I am doing the work.)

After the juice is drained, the buko is cut in half and the meat is scraped out of the shell for the salad. There is a special tool for this. You can see the tool on the scraped shells below as well as the meat from this one buko in the container.

You add some cream, condensed milk, and a can of fruit cocktail, chill and you have a nice buko salad for your desert.

The niyog are another matter. The meat is used mainly in cooking, especially vegetable dishes. To use the niyog, the outer husk has to be removed. Here the lady that does our laundry is removing the husk from a niyog for today's vegetable dish.

The meat now has to be scraped. Usually we have it done at a neighbor who has an electric scraper (a motor with a burr at the end to do the work.) They were closed today so we borrowed a manual scraper from a neighbor.
It is hard work. Here is Jan doing some scraping.
The meat is soaked in water and then squeezed to get the "milk" that is used for cooking.
Today our vegetable will be leaves from a tree!!! It is a malunggay tree (also called moringa, or sajina, or horseradish tree - do a google search and be surprised about the benefits of the leaves.) We have one in the front yard so it is just a matter of cutting down some branches and stripping the leaves. No matter how much of the tree that you cut away, it will still continue to sprout branches and leaves!
















The leaves and milk are put in the wok along with garlic, some smoked fish and chili peppers and cooked up. Some of the liquid evaporates during the cooking.
And here is the finished dish that we had for lunch. It is really delicious and healthy! You don't know what you are missing!