Filipino New Years & saving food

There is a tradition on New Years Eve in the Philippines where you have to have a basket with 12 different kinds of round fruits. I think circles and round things symbolize fortune. And there needs to be 12 for each month of the new year.

Rommel and I decided to do NYE in this year to save money and keep things chill after too much traveling and stress around Christmas. We invited his parents to come down and stay with us at our apartment and his mom is VERY in to all of the Filipino NYE traditions.

She brought the giant basket of fruit for us for good luck.

I definitely appreciated her thoughtfulness and celebrating NYE while following the many Filipino superstitions, but this giant basket did almost cause us some problems....

First, it's a HUGE basket of fruit - more than 12 actually and she even added some not round ones in there - there is no way the two of us could eat all of these before they go bad. Second, Rommel and I have cut back on fruit to reduce our sugar intake temporarily. We are still eating a little bit of fruit every now and then, but it has definitely cut down.

So what do we do with all of these fruit?

Freeze them!!! To add to our green smoothies when we incorporate those back in to our diet :) These will be perfect for cold smoothies and we won't even need to add ice because they are already frozen!

Sliced pineapple ready to freeze

We sliced up all of our fruit, laid them out in a single layer on a baking sheet, then popped them in the freezer. We let them freeze mostly through, then threw all the slices in a big ziploc bag. If you make the extra effort in the beginning to let them freeze with the chunks all separated on a baking sheet, it will make things much easier to use later. You wont' have one giant clump of fruit to thaw - all the juices already froze so you should be able to take out individual frozen chunks straight from your freezer bag later on.

We did the same with bananas, pomegranate seeds, pomelo, and some others.

We also had a lot of apples and pears. I felt like these would taste better cooked and spooned on top of yogurt.

I chopped them, sauteed them in coconut oil until soft, and added some stevia, nutmeg, and the tiniest pinch of salt to bring out the flavors. I put these in ziploc bags and popped them in the freezer for later as well.

Just making sure our food doesn't go to waste!