homemade

while walking past the small room used for cooking, i noticed that nyoman was sitting inside in the dark, on the bench/countertop twisting something in a big basin and the wood burning stove had 2 huge black steaming pots on them. aha! maybe she is making coconut oil?! with a few words in indonesian ("what" "you" "do") and pointing and her not knowing a word of english, we tried to understand each other...she couldn't understand why i would want to watch what she was doing...and then i thought "oh gosh,,,she's just washing her laundry! how embarrassing that i push myself on her like this...) and i started to exit, smiling. she came after me with a bottle of translucent light colored liquid inside and i assumed she was offering it to me. i put two and two together and realized it was coconut oil she had made and was giving me. thank you! and then my eyes caught sight of a big basin with something that looked like grated coconut, some more words and pantomime and yes, she was indeed making coconut oil and i could watch. 

what was in the basin on the ground would go to the pig. it was the grated coconut that had already been soaked in water and wrung in a cloth to extract the coconut milk/oil from it and was no longer for human consumption, but great for that fat little pig they were raising for someones' sacrificial offering one day. i realized that the previous evening i had heard her cracking something, and then this morning when i returned from the market at 5:30, the neighbor was there and the coconut grating machine was going and i wondered what it was all about. what could the neighbors' wife do with basinfuls of grated coconut day after day? i thought maybe she was running some kind of conditory and planned on checking her out too. but once i saw nyoman with 2 basinfuls of wrung grated coconut i realized that she and the neighbor are just making the coconut oil every other day, that they sell to the villagers.

so on their plot of land there are many coconut trees, among other fruit trees, the older coconuts are used for grated coconut or coconut milk or 20 of them are used each time in order to end up with 8 liters of oil. the younger coconuts are used for drinking the nutritional coconut water the next hour and a half i sat, stood, and watched silently what she was doing. since the small kitchen didn't really have room for the two of us, she pointed to an old folding chair outside, opposite the open door, and i watched her attentively tending the fire, which kept the coconut water boiling for about 2 hours as the oil slowly rose to the surface. then she skimmed it off with a big wooden ladle after lifting the very heavy pots from the flame, and replacing them with a wok which now received just the skimmed off oil. this oil was then boiled a few more minutes until the milky appearance turned translucent and the oil was ready and would now be cooled before bottling. 

 i sat and looked into this dark room, made from raw concrete a meter high and then finished with bamboo slats till the ceiling, allowing the smoke and steam to exit, the sunlight to stream in, along with a little air. everything looks filthy dirty, yet is clean. the few utensils that hang against the wall have all been well used, and serve their purpose even if the handles are broken and the edges of the palm leaf rice sieves are burnt, the rags black from soot and use.

i had never seen any kind of oil being made before, and the words "cold pressed" ran through my head, and i realized that all of the heating of the oil is the opposite of "cold pressed"...and wondered what the nutritional value is for each type. also thoughts of how all of this has been mechanized in the world...machines are processing the coconut oil, not 60 year old farmers that pick the coconuts, cut them open, pry out the coconut lining, grate it soak it, wring it, boil it, gently skim it off the top of the large quantity of water that separates it through the heating process, delicately blowing on the ladle to encourage the thin layer of oil to be skimmed off without any additional water, the tending of the firewood from the branches of the other trees on the land, and the experienced eye observing the oil in the morning sunlight coming through the slats of bamboo as she awaits its translucency and can remove it from the fire. 

once it is cooled and bottled, a young couple who make the rounds of the farmers collecting their produce and products, will carry it off to the marketplace. the pig will be happy to get all the leftovers, including the coconut tasting water, and the big pots will have boiling water poured on them and then scrubbed a bit on the fire and again hung on the walls of the dark little kitchen until the day after tomorrow when she starts again. i wondered how the vibrations and energy that is in this homemade coconut oil, that has been lovingly made by humans that have tended the coconut trees with care and attention until they reached maturation and could be climbed up on and the coconuts cut off and dropped to the ground and then prepared for the oil with peaceful quiet attention, differs from coconut oil made in a factory?