Too Much Fruit

Between our first and second haus kuk weekends (cooking entirely over the fire), we made a trip into town to shop at the grocery stores for four more haus kuk weekends. Shopping in Madang is similar to shopping in the US in that there are aisles with food which you walk through pushing a grocery cart. That is pretty much where the similarities end. To enter or exit the store, you walk through a gate manned by a security guard. We have been told we may be asked to check our bags at the front if we have items from another store, but we have not had that experience yet. We’ve also been told that if we see something we want, it’s best to buy it right away because it may not be available again for months!

We have a cookbook with simple recipes for cooking on the fire from POC, as well as a “More with Less” cookbook with basic recipes. Still, it was a challenge to find everything we needed in the stores we visited! We found almost everything essential to lentil stew, Mexican chili beans, refried lentils, and a few other similar recipes, but chili powder eluded us at every store. To compensate, I bought a bottle of Tabasco sauce. We’ll see how essential chili powder turns out to be!

Now that we have more experience shopping for greens at the market and cooking over a fire, we are making a bit more complex meals. We had some ham that I had won in a competition to guess the score of the Super Bowl (frozen in the kitchen freezer), and we fried that with some tulip for lunch on Saturday. Tulip is an edible leaf from a tree, literally meaning “two leaves.” Next weekend we will try our hand at preparing and cooking snake beans!

We also bought a native fruit whose name I can never remember. It has a red, spiky outer shell that you squeeze open and eat the gelatinous fruit inside (the spikes are soft). The lady selling them at the market had them spread out on a blanket with a small cardboard sign stating their cost. Eric thought it said 70 toea (compare to cents) for a group of two, so he handed the woman 1 kina 40 for two groups. The lady then scooped up several handfuls and loaded up a whole bag with the fruit. Eric was confused about why he had gotten so much fruit…as it turns out, it was only 10 toea! We will have our fill of this delicious fruit this weekend.