Up until recently, I thought that Auntie Lourdes' husband was dead—I’d never seen him, they didn’t mention him very often, and another son died a year ago, so I just wasn’t sure. Well, at the dinner table a few nights ago, I got the courage to ask Lola Lourdes (Auntie Lourdes' mother-in-law) how long ago he’d died. That’s when I found out (after a look of surprise) that he just worked about four hours south of Manila as a professor. Well, that was an uncomfortable moment. Fortunately, Auntie Lourdes wasn’t there—she had left for Manila that afternoon to visit the rest of her family.

The running joke with Auntie Lourdes, is that Lola Lourdes' son, Raul, loved Lola so much he wanted to marry a woman with her name just to keep it in the family. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but Auntie Lourdes is truly a wonderful woman. She's really the glue that keeps the family together.

One thing I love about Auntie Lourdes, besides her patience and good nature, is that she also kindly indulges Adam’s and my crazy whims—like our juice and smoothie attempts.

Just the other night, Adam and I sat around talking at the dinner table about food that we missed back home. I mentioned that there was a restaurant with amazing grilled cheese sandwiches, and another one with banana shakes. These are not things I would normally ever eat back home, but for some reason they are so American that I feel less homesick just knowing they’re around. Anyway, when I mentioned the shakes, Adam and I got to talking about how great it would be to have smoothies. That’s when Lola mentioned that she had a blender and a juicer. A blender? A juicer, even? Miracle of all miracles! A few days later, we made papaya, banana, pineapple smoothies that were pretty darn tasty—but would have been better with some yogurt I think.

The bigger debacle was the juicing. Adam mentioned that his uncle used to make carrot, apple, chard juice. There’s a local green here called pechai that’s a small version of chard. So, one day Adam picked up the greens and fruit at the market to juice.

The two juices:

Every one except Auntie Lourdes thought we were nuts. She had actually done demonstrations to sell the juicer some years before and knew how to work it—it was actually a Cuisenaire and juicer combo. But who wants to juice vegetables? Most people don’t even like vegetables here very much—they prefer meat and rice. I suggested we juice the apple and carrots first because it would be sweet and everyone would probably like it. We juiced about two cups worth and passed it around to the family members. I tried to read people’s facial expressions to get their real reactions. For the most part, they seemed to like the carrot-apple, as weird as it was to them.

Then came the real test—carrot-apple-pechai. We juiced it up with Auntie Lourdes’ help and the dark green juice spilled into the container below. Everyone stood around watching at this point, and Lola burst out laughing. “You’re going to juice that? It will be healthy, but maybe it will not taste so good!”

We poured the juice; Adam and I each took a sip. Tasty. Auntie Lourdes took a sip. “Mmm…naimas.” Delicious. She seemed to be telling the truth. Lola, a real champ, took a sip and then set the cup back down. “The other one I like better,” she said, gently pushing it away from her. Nellie and Mart wouldn’t even try it.

But then we had an interesting question: what do we do with the leftover greens in the juicer? “These will be eaten by humans,” Adam said, and I knew what he meant—we couldn’t waste the greens like we do in the States. Auntie Lourdes said that we could mix the carrot fiber with meat and make meatballs. I pushed for a veggie option—what if we mixed it with flour and eggs and made fritters by frying them?

Auntie Lourdes frying the pulp from the juicer:

So that’s what we did. For some reason, the pechai-carrot-apple fritters were orange initially, but turned green when cooked. So, we told a few of the family members that we were having lizard meat for dinner, which worked like a charm. Eventually, they all saw through our ruse, but with a little ketchup, the veggie fritters were pretty tasty. The next night we had carrot fritters. Lola, who’s a trifle deaf in one ear, thought someone said the carrot fritters were caribao—water buffalo. So we called them carrot-bao fritters, surprise, surprise. Carrot-bao and lizard meat. Yum.

Lizard Meat Patties:

I’m not sure we’ll juice a heck of a lot more though—we had to go through way too much work to figure out how to use the greens left behind.