Meals (take two)

This blog is called take two because the first one disappeared when the internet connection died a few minutes ago. Anyway.

Much of the food we like to eat is imported. Locally grown food includes taro, cassava, kumara, various types of "cabbage", tomatoes, eggplants, beans and capsicums, pumpkin and cucumber. Apparantly you can buy local beef, though I've never seen it. People kill a pig to celebrate a wedding and chicken and bacon is available in the market or local stores. We often buy the latter two, to support local enterprise, although the price of locally grown bacon and chicken is the same as the price of their imported counterparts.

So, the list of cheap food is rather short, being limited to locally grown food. Apart from fruit, all other yummy food is imported and thus expensive. So, chocolate is off the list :( Actually there are local cacao plantations but I've never seen the sweet delicious product of it in edible form.

Because we want to maintain good health and we are blessed to have sponsors, we don't have to live on cassava and cabbages but can eat the food we like. Well, within reason - milk is all powdered. I've always been opposed to using packets and the Bulk Store has an adequate supply of spices and herbs so we get by quite well. Let me give you an example.

Kumara is quite inexpensive, purchased from the market. You can buy a heap of kumara, about this size, maybe 12-15 in a heap for 10 Solomon dollars, or about NZ$2. So, kumara is a good staple. But kumara tends to be a bit dry, but not if you mash it with yoghurt and wholegrain mustard. Then it's delicious.

It made the perfect accompaniment to ghoulash. The ghoulash featured a small amount of cheap steak and heaps of locally grown vegies - capsicum, tomaotes and eggplant. With the right seasonings, it was scrumptious. I used my own lettuce for the salad as well as cucumber and tomatoes (Cucumber costs SBD$2 or 3 at the market. That's about 40 NZ cents!). I splurged by putting some cheese in the salad. Sometimes the Bulk Store sells expired cheese (how does cheese pass its use-by date! It just gets better!) for cheaper than you can buy cheese in NZ. I think that's why I splurged. Sadly, there's no expired cheese for sale at the moment. Also, when I was in NZ I bought a precious bottle of balsamic vinegar which I added as the dressing. (There's always too many precious things I want to take back here with me when I go for a yearly visit to NZ). The balsamic vinegar also makes the perfect addition to homemade mayonaise. Maybe my next post could be about homemade essentials...

We usually eat our hot meal at midday, because we're both around the house and it makes the afternoon easier. So while we were eating this yummy meal on our deck, Theresa was crawling around and...

pulling on Laki's ears. Oh, how Laki loves her.