Our neighbor has a starfruit plant. Tree? Bush? Tree, I think.

Many of the branches hang over into our yard, and I get to watch the starfruit grow.

And then, when the starfruit is ripe, I get to pick it. And eat it.

Happiness.

We have a neighborhood bread trishaw. We also have neighborhood ice cream trishaws.

This bread trishaw goes through our neighborhood, and others, playing an annoying tune that everyone recognizes as belonging to the bread trishaw. Those who want to buy bread run out to the road with rupees in hand and buy… whatever.

I should mention that this frequently happens before breakfast so there’s fresh bread in time for breakfast, bread being a common-enough breakfast item.

They sell loaves of bread, sweet buns, fish buns, egg buns, and other such baked goods and pastries.

The last image is of a bread truck. Same idea as the bread trishaw, just bigger in scope.

You Canadians and Americans have drive thrus. We have bread trishaws.

Well, mostly, anyway.

Being a Canadian, I didn’t know that coconut scrapers were called coconut scrapers – I would have called them shredders or something else, but coconut scraper it is, at least in this part of the world. After all, how many coconuts did I ever buy when I lived in Canada? Less than half a dozen? Yeah, that’s not experienced.

As it turns out, there are several types of coconut scrapers, and what kind you go with depends on your needs.

Hand-held type

These coconut scrapers that are somewhat similar to lime zesters. They scrape small amounts of coconut at a time, so take much longer to scrape a coconut. If you’re looking for a small amount of long shreds or wide shreds, then this would do the job, but if you’re looking at scraping an entire coconut, then, well, let’s just say my hands are already throbbing…

The images are from Gourmet Sleuth. There’s also an image there to a bench coconut scraper that they refer to as a Thai wood coconut grater. It isn’t. I mean it isn’t just a Thai design. That design exists in Sri Lanka, and, no doubt, India, Bangladesh, and other countries in the region.

Counter-top models

C-clamp coconut scraper

We use a coconut scraper with a c-clamp that attaches to the counter, either temporarily or permanently. The clamp becomes loosened while I use it, but that’s to be expected since I also use some heavy cloth to protect the counter – don’t want to scratch the counter surface, after all.

Other people clamp theirs on and never remove it. If it’s attached tightly enough, it NEVER loosens. We have nowhere to permanently mount, so we remove and re-attach at will.

With this c-clamp scraper, I can scrape a whole coconut in about a minute. When my joints aren’t bothering me. When they are, it might take me a minute and a half. This coconut scraper is highly effective at getting the job done quickly. And, as long as you hold the coconut around the shell with your fingers not close to the shell edge, you won’t even injure myself.

Clumsy me has managed to not injure myself yet, knock on wood.

This Australian site has a counter-top c-clamp style coconut grater for sale at AUS $49.01. The one I use costs around Rs. 900 (about US $9) at Arpico.

Suction/vacuum based coconut scraper

My mother in law used to have a coconut scraper with a suction base, but the suction was so horrible that it took one person to hold the scraper in place while the other person scraped the coconut. Hardly practical or useful, and really, just an all-round failure in engineering. NOT the kind I would ever recommend.

The very next time we went shopping, we bought the kind with the c-clamp.

The image for the suction mounted is from Spices of India.

Bench scrapers

My mother in law uses a bench coconut scraper. She straddles the bench with the scraper out front and scrapes the coconut against the blade. She’s pretty quick at it and can have a coconut scraped in the same time it takes me to scrape a coconut with the c-clamp kind.

I can’t use it because, quite frankly, I wouldn’t be able to stand again. Pesky bad knees. And back.

The first image is from Temple of Thai while the second image was take at my favourite mortar & pestle and cast iron griddle shop.

Motorized

These kinds are really more for high-volume coconut scraping. I saw one at Arpico once, priced at around Rs. 7500 (about $75 US). Saw another one at my favourite mortar & pestle and cast iron griddle shop for around the same price. Yehaw!

You might also be interested in reading a post over at Mental Masala about attaching the round scraper ball to a power drill. There’s also a picture of the suction-mounted coconut scraper that I so hate and find so completely useless.

So.

Clear as mud? Questions? Does that tell you everything you ever wanted to know about coconut scrapers?

I’ve mentioned before that not everyone here owns a proper stove with oven. It’s quite common for people to use propane burners like these. Although not everyone can afford this much.

We have one neighbor, an old woman, who lives down our road and comes to the abandoned lot next to our house every now and then to pick out pieces of wood for her to use as a source of fuel for cooking.

This big truck is transporting gas cylinders for Shell.

The gas cylinders are used for cooking either with gas stoves like I have (4 gas burners plus an oven with a broiler) or with what those from the US and Canada would think of as camping stoves with one to three burners, although they don’t come with the wind shields like the camping stoves do.

Most people can’t afford stoves with ovens, so either use the camping stoves with the gas tanks or use other forms of fuel for cooking, like kerosene cookers, wood, coconut husks, and so on. And, even when they have a stove with an oven, the oven is seldom, if ever, used.

Personally, I use our oven frequently. I have a feeling, though, that Fahim’s mother has never used hers.

Tags: cooking, baking, gas, propane, stove, oven, burner, Sri Lanka

My mother-in-law kindly showed her coconut de-husking and wacking-open skills for me while I recorder her doing it. She’s very accommodating.

Here’s the result.

It’s only 1:25 long and well worth watching.

Here, we’ve got a few produce shops.

See all the bananas hanging there? Most shops here store their bananas that way – more efficient – then will cut off a hand as a customer selects it. The bananas still on the stem is the way plantations sell their bananas to the middle men. When my mother-in-law sells bananas from her garden, she sells the entire thing like you see here.

Inside the shop, there’s more produce for sale.

Now, here’s something I don’t see very often. Bananas sold at the side of the road, out of boxes and on a table, all hands off the stem. Really not common.

At grocery stores like Arpico, Keell’s, Cargills, or Food City, bananas are sold off the stem by the hand, and I’ve seen a few shops that sell bananas by the hand off the stem as well, but not usually at the side of the road. Go figure.

He also has some local oranges for sale by the looks of things. Those greenish-orangish globes of citrus fruit? Yep, those are local oranges.

Things that are sold out of trucks or from makeshift stalls or tables set up on the side of the road? Just about everything. Water buffalo curd. Treacle and jaggery. Papaya, mangoes, mangosteen, rambutan, guava, oranges. Cashews. Pineapple. Thambili (king coconut).

Really, just about anything.

Tags: produce, bananas, shops, stalls, Sri Lanka

I found some interesting and new-to-me information on The World Bank site:

At present this service is at a critical level. Only about 1 out of every 10 households have water on tap and every fifth person relies on rivers, streams and other unprotected water sources for their drinking water.

About 30 percent of village and small town populations have private access to safe water sources.

I knew that many people didn’t have water to their houses/huts/dwellings, but I didn’t know it was that low.

Tap water is not generally considered safe for drinking, yet many people cannot afford the cost of the fuel to boil the water they drink every day.

In our house, we boil all drinking water. Fahim tells me that his parents started boiling their water after the birth of one of their children, so for Fahim, it’s been a habit to boil water for a very very long time. Me? I started boiling water after I got here.

We boil our water in this stainless steel pot, which holds around 10 or 12 liters of water. After the water’s cooled down, we pour it into the water tank that has a spout at the bottom. We go through around 4-5 liters of drinking water a day, so boil water every other day. Ish.

Sometimes, our water is noticeably brown, usually after some work has been done on the water mains. Happily, in the time it takes for the boiled water to cool down, that usually settles to the bottom so we don’t get much of it. That also means we have to clean the water tank more frequently.

Ah, life on a tropical island…

Tags: water, drinking water, safe drinking water

Bananas grow just about everywhere here in Sri Lanka to the point that you’d swear they grow wild. Oh, wait, they probably do. :p

Lots of people have banana plants growing in their yards. Go for a five minute walk in our neighborhood, and you’ll pass dozens to hundreds of banana plants, depending on how fast you walk.

Next door to us is an empty lot where cows generally graze, tied to a banana plant or coconut palm or, sometimes, not tied to anything at all but freely roam. There are a half dozen or so banana plants on that lot, so it’s pretty safe to say that there are generally bananas in various degrees of growing and ripening over there. Here’s a picture of some of those bananas.

These bananas are still on the plant, not ready for picking yet.

These bananas are much shorter than any bananas I ever saw in Canada, which were usually 5" or longer.

On the right are kolikuttu bananas, which are considered to be the best bananas. They’re sweet and flavourful.

I asked Fahim about the bananas on the left. He wasn’t sure what kind they were, but he said they looked to him like a hybrid. They’re not ripe yet, so we haven’t tasted them.

Tags: banana, banana plant, tropics

We opted to get outside food this Eid. It’s so much less work and so much less tiring. Unfortunately, it’s not quite as good as homemade.

We ordered the mutton biryani package from Miami Catering.

The mutton biryani came with six hard-boiled eggs and 1 kg mutton (minimum! they say).

It also came with 1 kg roast chicken (minimum 1kg! they say), along with wattalapam, pineapple slices, onion & date chutney, Maldive fish sambol; and a curry with peas and cashews. Dishes subject to Rs. 100 deposit while the entire package came to Rs. 2750.

And, as a side note, when you go to catered events, like weddings, this is pretty much what’s served. The exact same type of biryani,  pea & cashew curry, Maldive fish sambol, onion & date chutney, roast chicken, pineapple. That particular selection of dishes – it’s quite the done thing.

Starting in the upper left corner is the beef curry that Fahim’s mom made. Very good, of course, although I was only allowed one piece (not good for me. )

To the beef’s right is the roast chicken. It came whole, so Fahim’s mom ripped it apart before bringing it to the table.

Next we have the four yellow plastic containers. Starting at the top and working our way down and to the left, we have the pea & cashew curry, then the date & onion pickle (elsewhere it would be called a chutney – six of one, half dozen of the other), the pineapple slices, and the Maldive fish sambol. Next we have the teeny tiny remnants of this morning’s pol sambol.

Right of all that is the mutton biryani with a fairly enormous amount of rice. After we finished eating, we gave half of the rice and mutton (along with most of the rest of the remaining everything) to the neighbor’s and still have enough left for dinner tonight and breakfast tomorrow for Fahim and his parents. That’s because tomorrow, they start the second round of fasting, the six optional days at the end of Ramadan. It’s not necessary to do them, but it brings more, uh, merit, although I’m fairly sure that’s not the correct way to word it.

Below the mutton is the wattalapam from Miami Catering. We gave that to the neighbor’s, too. We had Fahim’s mom’s wattalapam, which is far superior to anything anyone else makes.

This is the wattalapam Fahim’s mom makes. Comparing the pictures of the one from the catering place to Fahim’s mom unfortunately won’t work very well – different lighting and so on – and, while I was going to take a picture of the two side by side, I didn’t actually tell anyone that I had that in mine, so by the time I was ready, the catering wattalapam was already gone to the neighbor’s. Uh…

So. Let me tell you, then. The catering’s wattalapam was several noticeable shades lighter in colour to Fahim’s mom’s wattalapam. Catering places, restaurants, what have you are all concerned with their bottom line. They want to make a profit. They can’t do that – they don’t think – without skimping on ingredients that they figure no one will notice anyway.

No, really, we do notice.

And that’s what makes Fahim’s mom’s wattalapam so superior. Fahim’s mom doesn’t skimp on ingredients. So her wattalapam comes out the way it should.

And really, I will share her recipe with you sometime.

Other entries about Eid ul-Fitr:

• Ramadan starts today
• Eid al Fitr
• Ramadan starts tomorrow
• Shopping for Festival
• Id-Ul-Alha (Hadji Festival Day)
• Breakfast on Eid ul-Fitr
• Lunch on Eid ul-Fitr
• What happens on Eid ul-Fitr?

Tags: Eid ul-Fitr, lunch, biryani, wattalapam, chicken, beef, eggs, rice, curries, sambol, chutney, pickle