CALAMANSI AND STARFRUIT JUICE

     The former flavor is intense acerbic citrus even marginally bitter - but the latter is sweetly sweet for contrast and full of juice. The harvest of the calamansi was pretty mundane: the medium tree at a friend's driveway growing in the side yard, and after work I stopped by to pick some, the house was on the way. And she had the stars separate and said they were from her niece's at the heights. Immediately once home I hand-juiced the two fruits and blended them in a mason jar aiming for a proportion to counteract each other at the same time harmonize their essences. The result is both the color of apricot and its scintillating taste, with a hint of kombucha rainier cherries and passionfruit. Salud!

    A brief walk down memory lane. I grew up around these fruits as natural vitamins intake through my informative years as a lad, at daily breakfast before the school bus came wearing my nicely-pressed Catholic white polo and khaki shorts my meal's companion libation was calamansi juice stirred with white sugar. On weekends at the family farm when it's their season, generally summer starting in March, the stars were a particular delight for me seeing them in trees hanging like model solar systems. We call them in Tagalog "balimbing," cleverly evoking an anthropomorphic idiom to characterize someone as "many sided," as the fruit is shaped that way ridged around five times over crest. I thought it was funny. We got to tease play peers with that expression if they suddenly turned against us, but the condition was immature jealousy and no one became foe. These food symbols were inveterate in my childhood, and the beauty is I grew up and they didn't. Lo and behold, they're still around. 

     It's hard to press on the cross-section of star if you're using a common upstanding reamer. For full juice not wasting a single drop use an artisanal juicer, the heavy all-metal kind, plunging the fruit through head on with the medieval handle. I used the former for absence of the latter equipment but made sure my hand gripped the star tight around so not a drop escaped down the mesh wire and into the glass-capture all. The cala is easy. Slice the tiny citrus in half and press each side with your fingertips over a  fine sieve basket, and make sure you have plenty of calas to make ample juice. When combined, like I said, these two fruits together have a delicious and zippy punch, too floral it could be a wellness shot. But why not? I benefited from cala and star - these motherland fruits - then and now.