Coconut Harvest

This is the usual three-monthly coconut harvest from the sixteen trees in my garden. The usual haul is 5 sacks, each of about 25 kilos kopras meat (about 100 pieces per sack).

It's a wonderful, bountiful tree - see: Coco Loco

It does everything you can think of, except, possibly, marriage guidance, but it's almost certainly got a secret chemical that will help with that kind of problem.

One brave fellow climbs the trees and trims off the ripe coconuts, and they come crashing down like small bombs.
Then they chop the whole nuts in half, and scoop out the meat with a specially-shaped knife, a lugit.



The meat is now kopras, but it has to be dried first, in a tapahan, which is really a bodged-up smokehouse, like this. The smouldering coconut husks are used for fuel, and the process takes most of a day.

I've often wondered why the operators of the tapahan don't also use the process to cold smoke a few fish or sides of pork, but perhaps they've never thought of it

Curacha Dancing Crabs

Curacha dancing crabs are a speciality of Zamboanga, at the extreme right hand bottom of the Philippines.

The first time I ate them, there, I found myself sitting at the next table to Nur Misuari, the politician then in charge of the Muslim provinces (ARMM) of Mindanao, and they were delicious (no, not the politician and his cronies, but the crabs).

Since then, of course, Muslims have gone very much out of fashion.

Nur Misuari's done a bit of jail time since, but then so should anyone who sets out to be a politician; a little bit of waterboarding wouldn't go amiss.

But we also have curachas here, in Siargao, where they are known as kanduyon or ladan.

They are good to eat, because almost all the useful stuff is in the main shell, so you don't need to fuss about too much.

They're called dancing crabs, because they sit upright in the water, on their back legs, and ponce about, like a bunch of poofs at a party.

Notice their claws; they're not a lot of use, being angled in the wrong way, quite against heavy usage. they merely use them for posing.

If these things were created, then the Great Creator made more than a few design mistakes. Thank God, He won't be held accountable.

But Thank God, He made them tasty. You can find some better photos than mine here.

Morning Bakery

Every morning at 5am, as the sun rises, reluctantly, Bebot's wife makes bread rolls, and they're wonderful.

They're not the usual Philippines pan-de-sal, that are altogether too sweet and mushy. These are almost genuine, unsugared, bread rolls.

I buy them for breakfast (for dunking in coffee or Milo) or even, sometimes, as a special 'English' treat (sliced hot with plenty of butter and a bit of Marmite).

The oven is very high-tech. It's a galvanised iron box, with a folded corrugated-iron roof folding over. This one even has a heat shield at the front. It's fired by a pile of smouldering coconut husks on top. Bebot's wife manipulates the bread rolls with something like a bugsay (paddle), with which she whips them around like a flock of sheep.

But the main problem is that no-one in the Philippines has ever learned to make bread properly. They use soft flour; they don't mature their yeast, etc. There is nothing here remotely resembling the fresh early morning French baguette; they learned bread-making from the Spanish, who haven't a clue.

And that's a big disappointment; I would love to eat a fresh hot baguette every morning. Maybe I'll get out there one morning and start preaching. I love fresh morning-cooked bread.

Coconut Bubble

This is a coconut in the process of sprouting. It's sent out a small shoot through one of the three 'eyes' at the top of the coconut shell, and soon it will send out some roots through another one.

The roots will go down, while the shoot stays up, so the shell will remain on the ground but keel over, as the roots take hold.

The bubble, buwa, is the conversion of the water and flesh inside the coconut shell into an embryo of the future coconut tree. Amazing how alike this process is to mammal reproduction, where the womb holds and feeds the embryo.

This one is well on the way, so the bubble has almost filled the hard shell, while the roots haven't got going just yet. Much of the coconut flesh is still there. Give it time.

Now, if you can catch a coconut that hasn't quite reached this stage (where the bubble gets a little bit spongy) then you get this, and it's delicious.

It tastes like a sort of coconut marshmallow, juicy, fresh and sweet.

Pano'on - Local Candy - Bromeliad or What? - Part II

I first wrote about pano'on just a week ago, and things have developed rapidly. First I contacted Brandon McHenry, who identified my Dischidia or talikubo for me. He, in turn, suggested that pano'on was not a bromeliad at all, nor a relative of maize, but a relative of ginger, which was a total surprise to me.

Brandon also introduced me to John Mood, a world authority on ginger taxonomy, who confirmed the plant was probably Hornstedtia conoidea, which also grows in Borneo.

Well, I hadn't seen much more of the plant than a few ripening buds and a few leaves, which had made me think it was this: Zingiber mioga - Japanese Wild Ginger, which is commercially-grown in Japan (and now in New Zealand) for its young buds, which are a great delicacy.


The buds are shown here:
(Click photo to go to 'the scent of green bananas blog for recipes)

Well, this really got me thinking. If New Zealand farmers are canny enough to grow this stuff for export to Japan, why shouldn't we do the same here in Siargao? Looked easy to me; it's a perennial, so you plonk it in the ground, and pick a bit idly from time to time.

But if you look at the botanical drawing, you'll see that mioga has a white flower, whereas our pano'on's flowers turn out to have a brilliant deep red flower (top right). And the local people don't eat the buds, although they do eat the unripe berry pods (and so do rats and other forest rodents - we didn't find a single young bud on the specimens Ron brought back, from his second expedition on Thursday).

Ron also mentioned another ginger relative, locally known as kayaskason, which also has edible berries, growing at the top of a long stem, so I asked him to get some of those as well, plus anything else he could find. He came up trumps. Kayaskason turns out to be a species of Alpinia, or even a natural hybrid, and extremely rare. It seems strange that it is common enough here for the local people to give it a name.

Well, that's exciting enough, but this photo shows only the unripe seed pods. We've planted it in the garden, but I don't think I can wait for the flowers to come out, so I guess we'll have to go and get some, to finally find out what it is.

But the third wild ginger that Ron brought back turns out to be a little honey. You can see in this photo the yellow flowers and pink fruit. Here's another photo of the pink fruit.










This one, apparently, is an Etlingera fimbriobracteata.

Now that I know these marvels are to be found in the forests around here, I'll be looking out for them.

Marang Fruit

Marang - Artocarpus odoratissimus

This fruit is about halfway between jackfruit and breadfruit, and a member of the same family. It grows on large trees (larger usually than jackfruit) and smells wonderful. That, of course is why someone called it 'odoratissimus'.

The skin is made of countless tiny tubules or spines, and you simply cut through it and twist it off, to reveal the individual fruit (actually arils, about the size of a grape). Each one of these has a large seed inside (which you can also eat, after boiling or roasting).

There's not a lot of taste to a marang, but it does smell good.

These are some I photographed in the Surigao City fruit market, going nicely yellow as they ripen.

Actually, there's a superb photograph at MVI~'s photostream at Flickr, which I can't compete with.
You'll also find more information at the ever-indispensable Wikipedia.

Shedney loves them; I am ordered, indeed commanded, to bring some whenever I do a bank run to Surigao City.

(There don't seem to be many exotic local fruit available here on Siargao Island. If people have a tree like this in their garden, it tends to go to the family, and no-one else).

Santol Fruit

I can't do better than to quote The Daley News, an Australian tree nursery, on this fruit:

Fruit Tree of the Month
Santol - Sandoricum koetjape

Native to Asia the Santol is a large fast growing and attractive tree. In their native setting they can grow to around 45 m with a large buttressed trunk and branches low to the ground.
In cultivation they are more commonly seen as a 15 m specimen tree. In Asia the santol is valued not only for its fruits but it is also grown as a timber and shade tree, although the timber is not of high quality it does polish well.

The fruits are large, round and rough on the outside with a thick textured yellowish skin. The flesh is segmented around the 3-5 seeds, they are called lolly fruits as the flesh sticks firmly to the seeds and it is best removed and enjoyed by sucking the seeds clean. Do not be tempted to swallow the seeds.

I find these fruit (or at least the 'lolly' part) to be as insipid as so many other South East Asian fruit, a sort of jellified sweet flesh with a flavour so goddam subtle that I have difficulty describing it. And the flesh sticks to the seeds like slimy cotton wool. However,the orange skin is marvellous; very tart, and solid.

I've used it to make some very, very acceptable chutney, the kind that nearly substitutes for Branston Pickle, the essential ingredient for a genuine cheese-and-pickle sandwich.

Nukos Tinola

This delicious Filipino soup is the kind of thing that Shedney used to make for me when she was trying to impress me.

I won't bother to give an ingredients list, because it doesn't matter very much. This is a dish made at the moment from whatever you have available.

Take the usual onions, garlic, ginger, and so on, plus any spices you particularly like, give them a quick fry, and then throw in some fresh squid (nukos) , and whatever bits of vegetables you have around (this lot included mange-tout (snowpeas - a recently introduced vegetable, but nice, all the same), local cucumber, tomatoes, and some unidentifiable green leaves, probably kangkong (swamp lettuce) - the oval white things are cucumber seeds from the local cucumber; sikwa).

Don't cook it too much. You want the squid tasty and tender, not like bits of boiled rubber.

Then add water. Easy, isn't it? And delicious.