Aelan Recipes

Good Afternoon,

My life here is so bafflingly different that I'm not sure how to even begin describing it. That's why I've been posting pictures instead of telling stories. I'm still not sure what to do so I'll start with something simple. Here's what I eat. The following recipes for "aelan kakai" can be easily prepared in your home if you'd like a little taste of the islands.

First, a word on ingredients. The people of Epi, and I think much of Vanuatu, use coconut milk like classic French cooking uses butter. To obtain coconut milk, find a dry coconut. The brown, furry, pre-husked coconuts you can find at the grocery store are dry coconuts. Hold the coconut in your hand on it's side so that the little face holes of the shell are at your thumb. Whack the coconut with your machete until it cracks open. It takes some practice to get it to open into two half spheres with clean edges. Next, scratch out the insides of the coconut. We use a "rass-rass" to make coconut shavings like those you would find dried in a bag in the baking section of your supermarket. Most recipes need two or three coconuts, scratched out. If you've managed to save the coconut water after opening, add that to the bowl of shavings. You can use a little water instead if you've made a mess of things. Squeeze the shavings with the water to get them to soak it up. Then, take handfuls of wet coconut shavings and squeeze them over your food. The white coconut milk will come out.

Alternately, I suppose you could buy the stuff in a can at the grocery store, but what's the fun in that?

Secondly, aelan cabis (island cabbage) is a broad leafed vegetable that resembles big green maple leaves growing on bushes. It's like a really strong spinach that retains it's shape a little better when boiled.

Basic Epi Breakfast

This is what we commonly eat in the morning if their aren't leftovers.

Boil a pot full of bananas in the skin. You can use strong bananas that have the consistency of plantains, taste like potatoes, and look like really fat bananas. You can use small sweet bananas the length of your finger. There are "Chinese bananas" that I think are the Cavendish bananas we have in the states. Then, there's a few others that all look the same.

After boiling the bananas, skin them and serve. If you'd like, milk some coconuts and poor the milk onto the peeled, cooked bananas, or boil the milk a bit and it will thicken.

Do this everyday for a few weeks.

Basic Epi Supper

Skin a pile of manioc (cassava), kumala (sweet potato), taro, or yams (sorry, I've never seem them in the states and no, that can of "yams" you ate at Thanksgiving was actually sweet potatoes).

Chop the skinned root crops into giant pieces and boil them. Don't use too much water, just enough to cook them or you're just wasting firewood. Just before serving, milk a few coconuts into the sauce pan with the root crops and serve.

If you have it, throw some aelan cabis in there and boil it too. Feel free to mix and match root crops at will or eat the same one everyday for a week.

Do this every night for a few weeks.

Bush Lunch

If you've gone to the garden with the family, why walk the hour or two back to the village fro lunch when you're surrounded by food. Dig up some wild yams, find some strong bananas, or knock down some breadfruit. Build a fire. Through the unskinned food onto the coals and roast them. Remove the burnt skins with your bush knife or scratch it off with a piece of broken glass. Wrap the food in a banana leaf so you don't burn your hands and eat. Get your little sister to climb a coconut tree and knock down some green coconuts to drink.

Simporo

So, you've got some time and energy and you don't want boiled food? Make Simporo. Skin a root crop or strong bananas. I prefer yams. Use a wooden board with a length of nail-perforated metal on it to scratch out the food into a mush. Place a de-stemmed aelan cabis leaf on one hand and use the other to grab a half handful of the mush. Put it in the middle of the leaf and roll it like a mini-burrito. Store the stuffed leaf cigar in a sauce pan and just keep stacking them in there until you've made thirty or so. Put an inch or two of water in the pan and steam the whole thing over a fire.

Lap-Lap

If there's a wedding, if it's Saturday, if there's a celebration of any kind, then there must be lap-lap. Dig a shallow pit, fill it with black stones and make a bonfire on top of them. While the fire is burning, scratch out buckets of bananas, manioc, or yams. This will take a long time if your feeding a horde of villagers. When the fire has burned out, sweep out the ashes with a tree branch covered in green leaves that you just cut down. Using split poles as giant tongs, remove half of the hot stones from the pit. Cover the remaining stones with lap-lap leaves. Lap-lap leaves are like banana leaves but bigger, stronger, and largely impervious to fire. It's like baking with oiled parchment paper. Poor the mush you're made onto the lap-lap leaves making a big disk like an inch thick wagon wheel. If you've got aelan cabis, put a layer on top of the mush. Wrap the leaves on the edges around the disk and put a few more on top. Put the hot stones you removed on top of the whole mess and leave the lap-lap to cook for a few hours or over night. After, remove the stones, unwrap the cooked disk, cut, and serve. If you've made banana lap-lap, you may notice that your local Peace Corps volunteer is suddenly absent eating with the neighbors. If you used manioc, he will suddenly be very friendly and hang around your kitchen.

Bread Fruit lap-lap

It's not really lap-lap, but I don't know what to call it. Pick some breadfruit that are ripe, but not mushy yet and roast them over hot coals. Remove and skin the breadfruit. Cover the palms of your hands in coconut milk (it can do anything) so that they won't burn, grab a skinned breadfruit in one hand and beat the hell out of with a stick held in the other. Turn the breadfruit while doing so and remove any exposed seeds or the core and you mercilessly pound this innocent vegetable. After pulping it into something like bread dough, give it to your grandma who will add it to the pile and spread the smashed stuff out on a big wooden tray. Milk a coconut over the weird breadfruit pizza dough you just made. Cut and serve.

Pumpkin Rice

There are pumpkins about, but the only acceptable ways to serve them are to chop and boil them like root crops or to chop and boil pieces of pumpkin with rice. Then mash the pumpkin about so you have orange rice. Kids love it. Do not attempt to make pumpkin soup or pumpkin pie no matter how delicious as the children will simply stare at it and wonder why you would waste a pumpkin like that and can they just eat more manioc with coconut milk, please?

Lemon Leaf "Tea"

Boil a very large kettle of water. Add the boiling water to mugs and add four to five tablespoons of white sugar per mug. If you have a Peace Corps volunteer present, remember that he likes his tea, unsweetened so only add two or three giant tablespoons of sugar per cup of water.

Oh, sometimes you can add a handful of lemon leaves to the boiling water, but this step is largely unnecessary.

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I'm surprised, but that's about it. There's wedding day beef soup, but the above list is 90% of what we eat on Epi. Chop up whatever fruit is in season and serve on the side. The occasional fish or snake bean can be tossed in the boiling water when you make root crops, but that's about it. There you have it, my diet on Epi. It's obscenely healthy, I get just enough protein, though very little meat, and I get my vitamins from the aelan cabis and fruit. The strangest part is that I like it. In fact, I'm going to cook some snake beans tonight that I purchased from some mamas on the side of the road. After a long day of traveling to talk about business or working in the bush, I look forward to eating roasted wild yams.

Daniel