How to Make Latik and Coconut Oil

Coconut Oil has many known benefits to our overall health, inside and out. Many do not know that making this oil at home is so easy, and has an equally amazing by-product: the “Latik.”

On New Year’s Day of 2019, I gave my first shot at making coconut oil.

I used coconut milk (gata) from 3 mature coconuts I bought from Novaliches Bayan. I had them pressed by the machine used by the vendors so I skipped the tedious task of pressing the juice out of the coconut meat!

Immediately as I got home (around 15 minutes from the market), I poured the coconut milk onto the pan and started the low flame. This is how it looked after around 30 minutes of boiling:

Gently mixing the coconut milk from time to time, one will notice that the bubbly whitish part seem to be set apart from the clear, oily part.

After about another hour under continuous low fire, it begins to turn brown:

The oil becomes more prominent and one can separate it from the brown part, which by now has turned solid. This just needs another 30 minutes and then voila! We have around 5 ounces of coconut oil and a lot of Latik for our delicacies. Overall, it took 2 hours to make this.

I hope to do this again for my future coconut oil needs!

Cross Stitchin’ Fruit Basket

I started this project over two years ago while waiting for my due date of delivery. I was able to do the basket part and the fruits in the basket, and then i gave birth and nothing was the same again. So this project was kept sitting somewhere in our storage room until I pulled it out recently and made some progress (below the basket).

In this post I will keep track of the progress.

I don’t intend to rush this, but instead to continuously give time for this while relaxing.

August 22, 2017 Update:

Life as usual becomes busy and all and if ever you come back to the things you love to do then you’re lucky! This is how my masterpiece-in-progress looks like now:

Have you noticed, much have been added below the two orange slices. I dwelt much on that although it’s more of a background. Moving forward I’ll focus working more on the fruits.

Spices in the Yard

It all started with that sprout on my ginger as we returned from almost a week’s Christmas vacation away from home. I thought it was good to put it in some soil and give it a chance at life, rather than cook it right away.

I have lots of distilled water containers which I converted to flower pots. The soil is unrefined, and is just a mixture of our front yard soil, some stones and a few rubbish. No extra preparation was done really. I decided to plant some garlic and an onion in the other pots.

Just this weekend I got the chance to take their pictures…

That’s the lone onion. It’s so pretty!

And here are the garlic sprouts:

I’m so glad that they sprouted even with little attention. They give me inspiration that one day it is possible for me not to buy these spices anymore.