Tonga, Kiribati, and Nauru joined a year earlier on September 14th, 1999.
The decision was made to celebrate all four together as a result of some quick math:
Let's see... We've done 5 countries in 8 months. There are 193 countries in the United Nations currently. At that rate we would complete the series of dinners after... carry the one... 309 months.
Wait what? That's almost 26 years!!!!! I'd be 54!
In order to live long enough to see the end of these dinners we have decided to hold a dinner once a month (that alone will reduce the time it takes to only 16 years), and those countries from similar regions and with similar food who joined one after the other would be celebrated all at once. Therefore...
Happy Tuv-onga-bat-uru Dinner Party!!! Tuvalu, Tonga, Kiribati, and Nauru are all island nations of the central Pacific Ocean. Everyone was assigned a country, and everyone brought a dish from that country. Jenny got Tuvalu (or "TOOOOOOVALOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!" as she likes to call it) and Amber got Nauru. Even Bryan had to carry his weight this time, so he was assigned Tonga. He negotiated cooking a dish down to bringing some sort of "adult beverage" from the region, and then pleasantly surprised us by actually cooking a dish! I was assigned Kiribati.
Kiribati is made up of 33 coral atolls spread across 1,351,000 square miles of ocean. Because the high saline content in the soil, vegetation is limited and they have to import most of what they need. In addition, with the oceans rising they are rapidly loosing land mass and have been negotiation with Fiji to purchase land and relocate their population of 103,000 people . Could you imagine your country just disappearing into the ocean? No more country?
All of these countries are really big on fish since it is the one thing readily available so I was worried I would be hard pressed to find a recipe without seafood. I'm not a picky eater, but if there is one thing I can not stand, it's seafood. (If there's a second thing I can't stand it's spicy.) Luckily I was able to find a very promising recipe where nothing in it was pulled out of the ocean: Sweet Coco Pumpkin with Pandan Leaves. Four ingredients, two of which I never heard of before.
Pandan leaves and kobacha pumpkins required a trip to China Town to find. I started at Uwajimaya, and I found plenty of kobacha pumpkins, but pandan leaves were a little harder to track down. Luckily a knowledgeable produce clerk gave me directions to a store that carried it, and after circling China Town for a while I finally found what I was looking for. Viet Wah had both frozen and fresh pandan leaves, though they were labeled the Vietnamese name "la dua" so it wasn't as obvious as I would have liked.
The day arrived, people started arriving, and we started cooking. A lot of what was brought was pre-prepared or didn't take a lot of time, so the cooking portion of this meal wasn't as large an event as it has been for previous meals. Probably a good thing considering this time it was held in my teeny-tiny kitchen!
We have gotten so into these dinners at this point that we would start discussing the next countries long before the dinner we are currently celebrating is over. There was some feedback that the dinners are more enjoyable if we are only focusing on that dinner, so we agreed, no more discussing future dinners until the current one is over! A little late, as we had already been discussing several future dinners, but it should work out once we get past all that.
Once again I have no complaints about our meal! And once again I can't seem to stop myself from overdoing it. We always have music playing and I tend to belt out the tunes as we go, but I was so full I couldn't sing as aggressively for fear of my full belly not being able to cope.
Too full for dessert, we started a game of canasta. After a few rounds we decided that we digested enough of dinner to try the tasty little banana-coconut balls Bryan made. I thought the Faikakai Malimalis (say that ten times fast!) were like dense little balls of banana bread rolled and lathered in coconutty goodness. I'm drooling just thinking about them.
After, we returned to the game which just happened to get extremely intense right after stuffing ourselves with dessert. The discard pile grew to half the deck and I could feel my heart pumping in my throat (along with the Faikakai Malimalis I just ate) and just as I thought I was about to throw up... the other team picked up the pile. Ahhhhhhhh!!! Between the food and coming down off that emotional roller coaster I was spent. (If you can't tell, I get weird when it comes to canasta.)
Pandan leaves and kobacha pumpkins required a trip to China Town to find. I started at Uwajimaya, and I found plenty of kobacha pumpkins, but pandan leaves were a little harder to track down. Luckily a knowledgeable produce clerk gave me directions to a store that carried it, and after circling China Town for a while I finally found what I was looking for. Viet Wah had both frozen and fresh pandan leaves, though they were labeled the Vietnamese name "la dua" so it wasn't as obvious as I would have liked.
The day arrived, people started arriving, and we started cooking. A lot of what was brought was pre-prepared or didn't take a lot of time, so the cooking portion of this meal wasn't as large an event as it has been for previous meals. Probably a good thing considering this time it was held in my teeny-tiny kitchen!
We have gotten so into these dinners at this point that we would start discussing the next countries long before the dinner we are currently celebrating is over. There was some feedback that the dinners are more enjoyable if we are only focusing on that dinner, so we agreed, no more discussing future dinners until the current one is over! A little late, as we had already been discussing several future dinners, but it should work out once we get past all that.
Once again I have no complaints about our meal! And once again I can't seem to stop myself from overdoing it. We always have music playing and I tend to belt out the tunes as we go, but I was so full I couldn't sing as aggressively for fear of my full belly not being able to cope.
Too full for dessert, we started a game of canasta. After a few rounds we decided that we digested enough of dinner to try the tasty little banana-coconut balls Bryan made. I thought the Faikakai Malimalis (say that ten times fast!) were like dense little balls of banana bread rolled and lathered in coconutty goodness. I'm drooling just thinking about them.
After, we returned to the game which just happened to get extremely intense right after stuffing ourselves with dessert. The discard pile grew to half the deck and I could feel my heart pumping in my throat (along with the Faikakai Malimalis I just ate) and just as I thought I was about to throw up... the other team picked up the pile. Ahhhhhhhh!!! Between the food and coming down off that emotional roller coaster I was spent. (If you can't tell, I get weird when it comes to canasta.)
(Celebrated January 23rd, 2016)
