Walis Tingting is as Filipino as can be. Coupled with the walis tambo, you can sweep inside and outside of your house. From the bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchen, sala (living room) to your front yard, backyard and side yards! They can all be cleanly swept.
Tambo can be used to sweep places with smoother surfaces while the walis tingtings are used to go into the more uneven corners and more difficult surfaces.
Walis tingting are gathered from the long fronds of coconut tree. There is a rather woody stick or spine that run through the leaves of the tree, each of these woody sticks are trimmed of from the leaves and then bundled up together like the photos above to make a walis tingting. The volume should be enough that it is ergonomic, comfortably held with one hand as you sweep.
In the Philippines, where I grew up, the coconut is very important that it is considered as the tree of life.
The basic reason is that the tree trunks, the whole fruits they bear, the leaves, in essence the whole tree can be of use to us.
Coconut is big business as well. The Philippines is a second major exporter of copra, which is dried coconut meat/flesh, a good source of coconut oil, which can be used for cooking, shampoo, and ingredients to beauty products and use for medicinal purposes..
The leaves are used to bind and wrap specialty foods like tupig, a much love dessert from the Ilocos region, where some of my ancestors lived.
The long spinedly woody part that runs through the fronds can be gathered up together to make a good stick broom called walis tingting in the Philippines.
The trunk of the tree is solid and strong hence it is known to be used in making wooden bridges and huts. In fact there is a beautiful building in the Philippines called the Coconut Palace, a project of Imelda Marcos.
The ‘water’ from a young or mature coconut fruit is a delicious thirst quencher.
The shell from the fruit can be made into charcoal.
This is my favourite, have fun polishing your floor and get good exercise by using the coconut husk.
These are just a few where you can use the coconut, the tree of life.
But having said that falling coconuts have killed more people that by shark attacks!
As a treat, we thought we should cook the rest of the cassava we still have in the fridge. We did buy a huge one. The first half was cooked as a cassava cake earlier this week.
We decided we should cook a cassava pichi-pichi but with a little difference from the Philippine version, we used evaporated milk as we do not have coconut milk at hand ;). Anyway they were both milk, weren’t they?!!! LOL
Our ingredients:
1 cup grated cassava
1 cup evaporated milk
1/2 cup sugar (white or brown – we used white)
1 cup grated coconut
Peter grated half a coconut using our Kenwood food processor. It took a minute to grate it.
We mix the grated cassava with the milk and sugar. We gave it a good stir. We then pour the mixture in a large non-stick pan; giving it a constant stir throughout cooking.
When the mixture started to bubble, it also began to thicken. We then lower down the heat and continued stirring the cassava mix until it was almost impossible to stir it without breaking a wrist or our precious wooden ladle, a quick taste and noted it was yummy and cooked.
We set it aside to cool down.
We then separated them into half a dozen balls and flatten them.
Each of the flatten balls which now resembled tongues were rolled into the grated coconut.
It was so delicious. Even Peter said it was so good; he does not care much for coconuts but he said Pichi Pichi was good!
Coconut, photo by PH Morton
Beautiful white meat of coconut, photo by PH Morton
Once upon a time, there lived in one of the barrios of Bago, Negros Occidental a very rich couple and their young daughter.
Their daughter was so beautiful. She had such a sweet face and most of the time she was so even-tempered. She often wandered around smiling, singing, skipping and dancing. The couple spoilt her; what she wanted, she got – most of the time!!!
But now and again she would throw a tantrum when she doesn’t get what she asked for.
The couple had a huge land attached to their equally huge farm-house. A large part of the land was turned into an orchard where all sorts of fruit bearing trees grew, beautifully scented flowering trees were also in abundance as well as majestic shady trees.
One day the couple were out in the orchard tending to their fruit trees when the girl came running to her father demanding that she be given a coconut.
The father gave her some ripened Spanish plums which were particularly sweet at that time of year. The girl refused the fruits saying they were not coconuts. She screamed her annoyance.
Her father looked at her indulgently, thinking that his wife must have planted this ‘coconut’. He told her to go to her mother and ask her for the coconut.
The girl ran to her mother who was busy at the guava grove. “Mom, I want coconut!”
Her mother picked the biggest, ripest, juiciest guava for her most beloved daughter.
“This is not coconut!” And the girl hurled the guava as far as she could throw, much to her mother’s annoyance.
But still she placated her daughter and gave her some other fruits. She said she had never heard of coconuts. She did not know what they were!
“This is not coconut, I want coconut, I want coconut, I want coconut”
Her daughter was turning purple with rage. She was stomping her feet, she was waving her arms, she was shouting at the top of her lungs and in between cried and cried.
Her father came to see what was the commotion was all about. He was so alarmed to see their little angel so aggrieved and so frustrated.
His wife had had enough and shouted to her daughter “God Almighty! All right, you better get the fruit yourself.”
All of a sudden there was thunder, there was lighting.
Then the earth started quaking and shaking.
It turned black as the night.
And then their daughter vanished from where she stood.
Her mother wept and wept. They looked everywhere for her; she couldn’t be found.
They looked and looked and looked some more until they were both too tired and can do no more.
At the crack of dawn they went back to their orchard to look for their daughter again.
What they saw was a plant growing in the very spot, where their daughter disappeared from.
To alleviate their sorrow, they tended to the plant.
Years passed and the plant grew and grew until it was more than twenty feet tall and started to bear fruit.
The fruit has white meat which was sweet and the water like tears. The two holes like eyes and the third one the mouth.
This fruit they called coconut, the fruit the girl wanted.
And that was how the coconut came about.
Coconut, photo by PH Morton
Beautiful white meat of coconut, photo by PH Morton
I was thinking about the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, a truly great woman, made me remember another lady with a charcoal-heated iron who is a marvelous woman blessed with an iron will herself – my Mother.
Long-time ago, really, really long time ago, 🤣 back when I was a girl living in Marag, Luna, Kalinga-Apayao, Mountain Province, Philippines – where there were no amenities like electricity, water on taps, gas on pipelines, television, medical care courtesy of certificated medical doctors/nurses, dentist, cars, etc, everything was done through basic manual labour. LOL, really long, long time ago.
Anyway my mother used to iron all our clothes once a month. That was a gargantuan task! She used to iron just after lunchtime up to almost 8 o’clock in the evening when her tiredness was made more tiresome by the dimly flickering kerosene lamp which was barely sufficient to shed brightness into a dark evening.
She used the charcoal iron, and that was laborious task to say the least.
Coconut shell Photo by JMorton
Before the day of the ironing, my sister and I would gather up all the coconut shells that we could find. We usually had a stack of them as we use coconut in most of our cooking. We would also ask neighbours, but the most fun was looking for them from under coconut trees where we usually find some weird and wonderful objects which usually waylay us from our task, much to my mother’s consternation.
When we had enough of the coconut shells and some bits of light woods, we would dig a hole and put all the coconut shells and tinders into the prepared hole in the ground. They would then be lightly drenched in a very small amount of kerosene.
We would cover the whole thing with an old tin kerosene can of which the bottom and top bits have been removed. We would light them and leave them until the shell and woods have turned into burning embers. To cool it down we would remove the covering tin can and bury the embers using the soil from when we dug the hole. After a day we would dig them out as they were ready and ideal to heat up an iron.
My mother would tell us to be good little girls and do the cooking and everything else as she would be too busy and too tired from the literal mountain of ironings. (I actually understand now how my mother must have felt after ironing. To date I could only iron for a couple of hours at the most and I am beat and I use an electric iron which is one of the best there is in the market)
My mother’s iron is like the one on the picture above.
Mother would put in the charcoal inside and sprinkle on it a little bit of kerosene. Then away she goes with a smoothing iron.
From time to time, she would empty the iron of the ash from the cremated charcoal and put in fresh charcoal and start with the whole process all over again and again until every single piece of cloth had been ironed and pressed.
Once upon a time, there lived in one of the barrios of Bago, Negros Occidental a very rich couple and their young daughter.
I was thinking about the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, a truly great woman, made me remember another lady with a charcoal-heated iron who is a marvelous woman blessed with an iron will herself – my Mother.