workdays

In the Linguistics Office, the job responsibility that I job-share with my friend, Joyce, we are getting caught up on emails. We’ve had some requests for old documents (pre-computer era) from folks doing masters or doctoral linguistic studies. These particular documents we only happened to have on paper in our Linguistics Library or in our archive room, so we had to hunt them down, see if we had them, if the authors had given permission for them to be given out, that sort of thing. I’m glad to have Joyce to use as a second set of eyes, when crafting emails to other folks, so that I make sure they sound nice J

I’ve also been starting to menu plan for the June module of VITAL. Our meals there mainly consist of rice served with some type of soup/stew/meat topping, root vegetables (sweet potatoes, taro, yams) boiled in coconut milk, cooked greens, and some fruit. This framework is fairly set, so mostly I just decide on the soup/stew/meat dish for each day. I’m so glad that I discovered dehydrating before the last (February) module, as that gives us more and cheaper options for ingredients for the dishes! I plan to dehydrate again for this module, so hope to get the menu worked out enough to be able to get a start on it next week.

dehydrating

Because VITAL takes place in the warmlands along the coast, the cool weather vegetables (carrots, capsicum {also known as green pepper in the States} zucchini, cabbage, tomatoes, potatoes) are hard to come by. And when you do actually find them, they are usually rather expensive and sad looking. SO-after talking about it with Liz, who you may remember helped me out with the buy for the October module, we decided that the thing to do was to plan ahead and purchase these veggies at the market in Ukarumpa, dehydrate them, and bring them down to Alotau when I come for the course.

January was my trial run, and I think that it worked out really well! I made one really big trip to the market and purchased loads of carrots and capsicum, and also some zucchini, cabbage, and potatoes. I borrowed a nice large dehydrator (about 10 trays tall),

and spent a little more than a week, with the dehydrator running pretty much the whole time (and me washing, peeling and chopping). Here are some of the results of that venture.

I spent a lot of time on carrots. Many of the soups we make at VITAL call for about 20 carrots—not the foot-long carrots that we get in the States, but little guys, usually about 6 inches long. In the market at Ukarumpa we can get a “heap” of about 10 carrots for 1 Kina (a little less than 50 cents). At the store in Alotau, a good price would be 2.50-3.00 Kina for 5 carrots. In the picture below, I tried to show what 20 carrots looks like washed and bleached (we bleach almost everything purchased at the market to kill bad germs), then chopped in a bowl and ready for the dehydrator, and the final result--dehydrated carrots in a sandwich bag!

I also dehydrated a few zucchini—they are a really nice addition to chicken soup. As you can see, this zucchini is a little longer than a standard sandwich bag. It probably cost about 2 Kina in the Ukarumpa market. At a store in Alotau, it would sell for closer to 9 Kina.

Cabbage is also an ingredient in our chicken soup recipe. I wasn’t sure how it would turn out (and sorry, I forgot to take a picture of the final product!—next time) but it worked! In the square bowl at the back, you can see the sliced pieces of one cabbage—when dehydrated, it just fit into one sandwich bag. At the front, on the dehydrator tray, is zucchini that has been cubed and then blanched in boiling water (I guess blanching is supposed to stop something inside the veggies, and make them keep longer when dehydrated).

I think that my favorite was the potatoes—they looked really cool all dried up! But, they were the last ones I did, and in my packing haste, I didn’t get a picture of them either. Anyways, in spite of all the time spent bleaching, peeling, chopping, and blanching--I think that the whole thing was a big success!! It was SO nice this module not to have to spend time hunting around Alotau stores looking for nice specimens of these veggies, and knowing that I saved so much on the price!

Abraham Meal

We usually try to have a special meal for the course closing each VITAL module. For this past October module, we had been translating selections from Genesis—key stories about Abraham, Jacob and Joseph—so some of the staff were inspired to try to give the participants a small taste of some of the foods and meal culture from the Middle East. Thus commenced what we called, “the Abraham Meal.”

We cleared the tables out from the dining hall and hung sheets, mosquito nets and tarps around to give it more of a “tent” feel.

Karla and Joanna hanging the entrance to our "Abraham tent"

For the food we decided on flat bread, hummus (chickpea/garbanzo bean dip), taboulleh (bulgur, tomato, cucumber, parsley & mint salad), tsatsiki (yogurt, cucumber & mint dip), falafel (fried chickpea meatball), lentil soup, lamb-kabobs (lamb meat is much cheaper here than in the US), and, of course, kaukau (sweet potatoes)—without which no PNG meal would be complete. The menu was maybe a little ambitious considering we would be feeding about 60 people and our cooks had never made any of these dishes before (except for the kaukau). We ended up making about 90 flat breads at the Centre the weekend prior to the course closing and freezing them until the meal on Friday evening, and our own cooks made another 30 on Thursday. We were able to get dried chickpeas/garbanzo beans for the hummus and falafel at the store without any problems and substituted brown rice for the bulgur in the taboulleh. There was no mint or parsley to be found, so we did end up missing a few of the flavors, but overall, I was pretty impressed at how things turned out.

Me, dishing up a plate of flat bread, taboulleh, etc.

In the past when I’ve made hummus we used a food processor or blender to turn the chickpeas into a paste, but we didn’t have one. So we ended up mashing them in a bowl using a bottle of soy sauce J It felt much more like what Sarah (Abraham’s wife) would have used to make her own hummus…though I imagine she wouldn’t have had a bottle of soy sauce either!

Christina, one ouf our cooks, and I are trying to determine if the lentils are done...neither of us had cooked them before! (The plate that I'm holding has a mound of garlic on it--I think we used two full bulbs of garlic for all of our dishes.)

Two of the staff played the roles of Abraham and Sarah, hosting a meal for their friends (the participants and special guests) and the rest of the staff all dressed up in our best bed sheets to act as servants of Abraham.

'Abraham' and 'Sarah' are being fanned with a palm branch by one of their 'servants'.

We called the participants to come to the meal with our PNG substitute shofar (ram’s horn)—a large conch shell. As they came in the door, they had their feet washed, and then were invited to take a seat on one of the mats on the floor. We served the meal in courses, and as the participants ate, “Abraham” and “Sarah” told stories about their lives. Abraham’s “chief servant” also told the story of going on a long journey and, with direction from Abraham’s God, finding a wife for Abraham’s son.

Abe, Sarah & servants preparing for the big meal...if you squint you may be able to see the giant conch shell in Karla's hand.

Knowing that foot washing was something that was done in Biblical times (it’s even mentioned in Genesis 18 as something Abraham does for his special visitors), we decided that it would add to the experience of our meal by washing the participants feet off in a basin of water as they entered our “tent”.

One of the participants having her feet washed.

We were a bit surprised to hear afterward that many of the participants were uncomfortable having their feet washed and having their food served by the staff. But in spite of that, and the food flavors that they were not used to, after they got settled in to the meal, the participants seemed to appreciate the experience.

The inside of 'Abraham's tent'...his guests are being served flat bread.