My favourite foods of the Cook Islands
Cook Island food is the best in the world. Some times Cook Islands cuisine gets monotonous but you can invent dishes which in my case was a crossover of western and Polynesian cuisine. My favourite food is breadfruit when its cuisine was breadfruit chips, drizzled with salt and vinegar.
Serve that with fresh barbequed fish and in the cool season, salad and you'll have a meal fit for a king (ariki).
Young fresh coconut juice would have the be the best drink in the world, especially on a hot day.
Volcanic soil of Aitutaki provides tropical fruits
and vegetables while the lagoon provides seafood.
Food feast are massive amounts of good Polynesian foods some
cooked underground, including:
Taro, sweat potatoes, yams and poke a glutonus dish wraped
and baked in leaves.
Pigs (wild have less fat than those feed coconuts)
chickens, fish,
goat. The way Aitutakian's cook goat has still got to make it my favourite red
meat cuisine.
Sauces include coconut sauce, sometimes slightly fermented
with chillies added.
Bananas of different varieties, oranges, mangoes, custard
apples, durian, star fruit, etc depending on the season.
Island nights often have a good variety of Cook Island foods.
If you're invited to a Cook Island
food feast it is customary to let the chief eat first. When I saw that the chief
always went for fish head, I learned that other cultures have some features better
than western culture. Now when I suck fish brains and eyes at dinner parties in
Perth to
the shriek of guests, I just say get over your cultural hang ups, your missing the
best part of the fish.
It is also customary to for Cook Island food to be eaten
with fingers.
In the wet season greens are
hard to come by except fiji ruka which is similar to silverbeat. Seaweed is nutritious
food and tasty.
Chillies are plentiful and in the wet-season when green
vegetables are difficult to grow, chilly plant leaves are edible. Good news about
this time of the year is that tropical fruits are in good supply.