Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Day +405 : Sarawak Pepper

I am fine today.

I am going to share with you some photo on Sarawak pepper which I took during my last trip back to home village. My family used to grow a lot of pepper trees last time. We were always 'summoned' by our mother to work in the pepper garden. In addition to this, we needed to help to process the pepper as well. When I was studying Form 5, I managed to carry 100kg of pepper :-) This heavy work 'trained' my vein to be big enough to appear 'beautiful' to the nurses. I mentioned this on my Day +8 blog.

A pepper tree.

Home-made wooden ladder for plucking pepper on the upper part of the tree.
Pepper ready for harvest.
Harvested pepper. Look delicious? But wait, it is not edible yet.
Half-dried pepper.
Dried black pepper - the king of spices. Just grind it before cooking :-)
A smart home town invention - the pepper machine. It is used to separate the pepper from the stalk. Countless evening my family members and I spent to process pepper on this machine.
Another innovative creation - slideable roof. Just slide the roof to cover the pepper within minutes when it is raining.
The white pepper is processed differently. After harvesting the pepper from the tree, it is soaked in the water for a few days to let the skin falls off from the fruit. Then dries the "skin-less" pepper under the sun. Sounds easy? But I tell you, it is definitely not a pleasant task to dip yourself inside a pool of "hot and spicy" soup while washing the pepper before drying them under the sun :-(

See you next post :-)

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