Recipe Time!

Recipe time! Today’s recipe: Tanna Soup.

Take: Some of something, some more of something else, a bit more of another thing, the remnants of whatever it is you’ve got hidden in the back of your cupboard or in the back of your fridge, water, and salt. Let it boil. Now eat.

For a legitimate Tanna soup, you should be mixing root crops and vegetables and throwing some coconut milk on top. But for you? Run wild with it. 

This leads into the joke.

Vanuatu gets its very first zoo, and, the day after it opens, a rhinoceros escapes. It is seen going into Teouma and never seen again. ... Tanna soup wan taem.

Banana in Coconut Milk

This is legitimately delicious and about the easiest thing ever to cook.

Bananas in coconut milk

Sweet bananas
Coconut milk

Peel the sweet bananas. Put them in water and boil til they can be pierced by a fork (kind of like potatoes.) Then pour coconut milk on top of them.

Delicious.

Banana Pie

Banana pie is delicious and it's a shame that people outside of Vanuatu don't eat it.

Banana pie

Ripe bananas

Coconut milk

Flour

Oil

Sugar

Milk

Water

This recipe is pretty chill. It doesn't require measurements because you really can't mess it up that much. (Plus, the mamas don't cook with measurements.)

Make a dough of flour, oil, sugar, milk, and water. You want the dough to be sticky and not too liquid. Think of it like cookie dough rather than cake batter.

Spread the dough across the bottom of a cake tin. Make sure it's equal height.

Now chop the bananas up into very thin slices. Arrange the sliced banana over the dough. Follow this with a good pour of coconut milk.

Stick in oven. Bake. Take out of oven. Eat.

Fish Soup

I keep saying this, but island food is pretty bland. Like so bland. The blandest food. Usually tastes of salt and blandness. But they've got a couple of culinary highlights, and this is absolutely one of them. (Although maybe I've lost my sense of what is good and what is bad.) 

Fish soup

White fish
Onions
Coconut milk
Curry powder
Maybe a little greens
Water

Boil the white fish with some water, not too much. Meanwhile, chop up onions and greens, put in with the soup. When the fish looks like it's going opaque, add some coconut milk and curry powder.

This is the better way of cooking it; sometimes we eat fish soup where it's just fish + water. Honestly, that one isn't bad either. It's very simple but pretty all right.

Island Fish Salad

This is the most delicious thing I've learned to cook at Vanuatu that I cannot possibly cook at site.

Island Fish Salad

Extremely fresh fish
Tomatoes
Cucumbers
Maybe a little onion
Coconut milk
Salt
Lemon or lime

Take your fish and cut it up into tiny little pieces. Squeeze a terrific amount of lemon or lime juice on top. Put the fish into a refrigerator to sit. The lemon juice will 'cook' the fish and make it opaque.

When the fish is ready, chop up tomato and cucumber into tiny cubes. Chop some onion, too, if you want.

Mix the tomato, cucumber, onion, and fish together. Then dress with coconut milk. The ideal texture (in my opinion) is a little soupy but not too watery.



They do this in Samoa without the onion but with a lot more coconut milk and bigger chunks of fish. Supposedly the style you see in restaurants here in Vanuatu is Tahitian-style. Whatever it is, it's delicious and the best thing ever.

Eat with garlic bread or salad.