Coconuts!

Before I started to travel, I didn't know that there were lots of different palm trees.

The Coconut palm grows all over here (we have a dozen on our plot)> The Killerplant page has a summary on it's uses. LINK

More on coconuts HERE. This tells about all the uses of the tree.

When our coconuts are starting to get ripe, we take them down and make Buko juice.

The liquid inside is delicious, and you then scrape the jellylike flesh and sugar into the drink...you can buy it fresh from street vendors for 5 pesos.

This is not coconut milk. For that, you take ripe coconut meat (which is semi hard) and grate it up, boil it, and then strain out the scrapings. We use this in recipes also, but it's a lot more work.

It's also too much work to make coconut vinegar or coconut oil (we buy it).

We use the lumbar, which is very soft, for scaffolding and for our chicken farm buildings, which are then lined with split bamboo for the floors, similar to traditional houses, so that the dirt/manure falls through the cracks.

One of Lolo's favorite dishes is prawn cooked in coconut milk, onions and garlic, and you eat it over rice. He always would buy a coconut (even in the US) to prepare it, but this Recipe gives how to make it from canned coconut milk. HERE.

We usually leave out the hot peppers, and you can leave off the prawn heads if you like. Our local market sells the prawn intact, but in the US they sell both ways.