This morning we traveled to Moses's home again. For those of you who aren't familiar with Moses, see posts entitled "Moses, Plants, and the Sugarcane Press" and "Moses the Medicine Man!". Today Moses walked us through the process of creating coconut oil. Coconut oil is popular in cooking, as a massage oil, and as a hair treatment. The process took us a few hours and was hard work, but the reward was several small bottles of our very own oil.
The first step was to obtain, cut open, and clean several coconuts. Next we used cheese graters to shred the coconuts into tiny pieces. This was tiring for our hands and was definitely the rate limiting step of the process, even with 6 people shredding at a time! After we had enough shredded coconut, we added some water to the bowl and used our hands to squeeze out the juice. We put the juice in a large pot on the stove and started to boil it. We added 13 cinnamon tree leaves and a few plantains. After several minutes of boiling, we were left with a cheese-like substance (which Moses instructed us was good to spread on toast!) and our coconut oil! The oil was poured into small bottles, and a small amount of bay oil was added to each bottle.
The process of making coconut oil was definitely more intensive than I had imagined! It took everyone in our group along with a few of Moses's friends to get the job done. I can definitely appreciate the cost of coconut oil after experiencing the time and hard work that goes into making it! It was amazing how many coconuts it took to produce a relatively small amount of oil.
After coming back from Moses's and having lunch, we had an herbal tea demonstration/tasting session. Justin brewed several different herbal/bush teas including cinnamon, spearmint, ginger, basilic, and some that I don't know how to spell! Some were better than others... my personal favorite was the spearmint. Again we were all impressed by Justin's knowledge of the different herbs and their uses. It seems that every time we talk about these different herbs we learn about new uses for them.
Well, that's all for now!
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