Quite the fad

here at the moment is to make your own fresh pineapple juice out of the leftover skins. I had not heard of this until a couple fo weeks ago, despite living on tropical islands for over 12 years!

Trish, owner of the Balcony, gave Kate (Turtle lady!) the recipe, but the information stopped there!! ha ha (sorry Kate), but a quick google search brings up lots of recipe ideas and wow its really healthy for you.

The one we liked was from the following website as we are also huge ginger fans. The first time we made it we added a little too much ginger (2 knuckles) and so in this one we halved the amount and it tastes great. We also boil it for about 20 minutes and leave it to steep for 4 hours, other sites say overnight but we dont want those pesky fruit flies to show up.

Pineapple skins and ginger on the boil

Pineapples at this time of year are in abundance though generally the season is only about 3-4 months, a pile of pineapples at the market is approx US$3.50 for 5 pineapples, and when you consider that you need this amount to make a litre of pineapple juice which would normally cost about US$4 in the shops here, you are getting a much better deal. Plus you are not wasting the great flavour of homemade juice.

The finished juice

Next years crop we hope!

The tops of the pineapples get put into our garden and we hope to have some of our own fresh pineapples next year. With the leftover skins, we crush them up and into our compost tumblers they go, adding again a great base for healthy compost.

The longer we live here, the more we learn about using every part of the vegetables and fruits we can get here.