Right, in my efforts to get back into adding posting here I thought I'd write about the food on Yadua.
For now (at least...) I'll ignore the interesting delights we managed to rustle up in our own camp, which mostly involved heaps of rice and chopped tomatos, with the occasional addition of tuna or spam! Instead this concentrates on the food we were served by the locals (apologies for any scrumptious omissions):
Tea and cakes:
I have to start here mostly because I have a fanatically sweet tooth. Tea mostly consisted of normal tea with sugar, but no milk, or as a rare alternative a lemon flavoured drink was made by stewing the leaves of a local plant.
Cakes ranged from the ever present doughnut to custard pies. Doughnuts were produced in huge batches every time we appeared in the village, and mostly we were served them with a pot of sugar on the side to sweeten them (though at times sugar ran low, so we did our best to kick that habit). They were a definite staple of life in the village, and could be eaten stale just by dipping them in hot tea. It was always a punishing challenge to finish the endless plates.
The cakes were much rarer, and reserved for special occasions, including when we were invited to the village for no other reason than to eat mountains of them. The custard pies were probably my favourite.
Our cake-eating session in the village:
Breakfast:
The day was usually kicked off with tea and doughnuts, but as a special treat we would also get batches of last nights cassava or breadfruit fried up with either sugar or salt, simple, but delicious.
Lunch:
We didn't stay overnight in the village too much, so this was the most frequent meal we ate with the locals. Once we had been "adopted" by various families we generally went off to eat separately with them, so I can't promise I know what everyone else was eating.
My family usually had various local fishes, from snapper to parrotfish, smoked and then added to a sauce made simply of coconut milk (handmade of course!) and finely chopped onions. This would be eaten using your hands with big plates of boiled casava and breadfruit nearby for soaking up the sauce. Just in case you have no idea what these are, then casava is also known as tapioca root and is a fibrous root that tastes a bit like a potatoe, but maybe slightly sweeter. Breadfruit is a huge round fruit that grows on trees and is not as fibrous as casava, but has little black seeds in it and tastes sweeter.
Occasionally we would also have crab-meat. My family would break open and suck out the meat from the crabs themselves, but always had kindly scraped out some meat for me beforehand so I didn't have to struggle with this. The crab-meat was sered in the same delicious sauce as the fish.
Other additions included noodles and a spinach-like local green
Lunch was served with water (we would generally have to share one or two glasses) and maybe a cup of tea afterwards. Grace was always said before eating and then the general rule would be to eat as much as physically possible (there was no better way of pleasing the villagers!), say thankyou warmly for the food and then struggle to another bure to sleep it off.
Greenforce eating lunch at Pita's house:
Dinner:
Dinner was pretty much the same deal as lunch. We did occasionally get something a little different in big group meals: a freshly killed pig that was chopped up into cubes and boiled (not my favourite by far!); smaller, bony, sardine like fish; rice; tiny, but very hot, chillies; and chitons. I'm not sure the best way to describe these, they are a type of shellfish with a flat worm-like body covered in hard plates on it's top. Unfortunately however they were cooked they were incredibly rubbery, impossible the cut with a knife and fork, and hard work to chew through. I tried my best though!
The "Table":
The table consisted of a mat rolled out on the floor on which all the food, plates, etc were laid. We sat around this and generally ate with our hands (sometimes the villagers would rustle up a few bits of cutlery to help out, but we quickly realised it was far easier and more fun to dispense with these). Sitting cross-legged for so long wasn't easy at first, but after a few weeks it got more bearable.
One really interesting thing was the order in which people ate. Often the table just wasn't big enough to accomodate everyone at once, so the village elders and us guests would be given priority. Others, including the children, would sit behind and wait their turn. However on teh big nights the most seasoned kava drinkers (most of the men) would forget dinner altogether and go straight to the kava bowl.
My family eating lunch at their "Table":
Island Snacks:
Suprisingly we ate little fresh fruit on the island, mostly because there were only a limited variety of crops that the locals grew there.
Coconuts grew in absolute abundance, and though we never got very good at scaling coconut trees, we collected hundreds lying around and a few of us became pretty adept at removing the husks and breaking them open to feast on the juice and flesh inside.
We also found the odd stick of sugar cane, which was a great, if unconventional snack. You had to bite off a chunk of the wood like flesh, chew and suck out teh sweet juice, then spit out the rest.
Other than that we found the occasional papaya growing within our reach and got given a handful of mangoes by O.J. (a local with a distinctive likeness to the disgraced American Football player) .
