WITHOUT AN OVEN

It is now a clear fact that Ruve St rocks without an oven. Bamboo steamers are the bomb, unless they become a bomb if you let your wok burn dry and the steamer happens to catch fire. That hasn't happened, but we smelt something burning this evening.

Anyway, I told you about the banana leaves I carried around town in a previous post. I have done some amazing things with my banana leaf. I haven't made a raft or turned it into a knittable banana leaf yarn, but it has flavoured the nourishment for the energy I need to carry other random objects around Suva.

Last night, I made Kuih Koci! The recipe was from Poh's Kitchen (bless her socks) and it tasted like a pyramid of Fiji-made-Malaysian heaven. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any fresh pandan leaves to add to the flavour. I received weird looks at school when I asked where I could buy fresh ones for cooking. In Fiji, they only use dried pandan leaves for mat weaving here.



The great thing about them is that they looked pretty ugly and untidy when I wrapped them up. However, once steamed, they had expanded into their banana leaf parcels and this was the result:



Tonight's dinner was also a piece of awesome. I had chicken marinated in coconut milk with fresh pineapple, dried basil wrapped in a Banana leaf:



Now, it also had this smokey flavour to it which might explain the burn marks around the base of our bamboo steamer. I think something must have caught fire at some stage, but the flavour it produced was AMAZING!