Making postaono

I have tried making village foods a few times while I’ve been in Australia, with varying degrees of success, but until now I hadn’t tried making postaono, mainly due to not being able to buy cassava.

I found some frozen grated cassava in a shop recently and bought it, saving me the work of having to grate the cassava myself too, but since I can’t find fresh cassava I can’t do that anyway.

I have helped with the various stages of postaono in the village, but I’ve never made it from start to finish, so I wasn’t quite sure on a few things and asked some of our village aunts on the phone for their advice over the last week or so.

So today was the day for making postaono. I got my ingredients together as shown below: frozen grated cassava (defrosted), tinned coconut cream (because fresh coconuts in Australia are rubbish) and a couple of bananas.

I cut open the packets of grated cassava and put them in the bowl.

Then I put in the coconut cream. This was the part that I felt most uncertain about. The coconut cream to cassava ratio is usually judged by eye, and I haven’t seen it often enough to judge the right consistency for myself. I decided to use the whole tin. This is the cassava with the cream mixed in:

Next I spread it onto a tray and spread mashed banana onto half of it.

Then I put more cassava on top of the banana and filled the tray.

Covered in aluminium foil and put it in the oven.

When it started to dry up on the top I took it out of the oven (maybe it needed more coconut cream, or maybe the covering should have been touching the cassava.

And here are two pieces of postaono – banana postaono on the left and postaono without banana on the right. Now you know what postaono is too!

Flight to Canada

Well I made it to Canada safely. My first flight was Melbourne-Los Angeles, then another flight to Toronto. We had two meals on the Qantas flight to LA, but on the American Airlines flight, you had to purchase a meal if you wanted to eat, so I didn’t bother as I had bought something to snack on at the airport in LA.

Here’s a couple of photos of my meals on the plane to LA.

Four cheese ravioli in a wild mushroom sauce, carrot and cherry tomato salad, fig and honey rice pudding, roll and butter, Boost chocolate and Jila mints.

Breakfast was bacon and zucchini frittata with pork sausage, baked beans and Roma tomato, and the extras were fruit salad, orange juice, passionfruit and raspberry muffin, and a cup of tea.

Sea urchins

One of the delicacies in the Teop area is the roe of sea urchins. We haven’t really been served it at any meals, but one time when we saw someone cooking some, we asked for a taste. I had a small taste of the orange roe. It was salty and fishy, probably not my favourite.

A sea urchin:

A basket full of sea urchins (In Teop: o hoi hoe):

Sea urchins being cooked on a rack over a fire:

“Drop” fundraising

One of the ways of doing fundraising in our area is to have a meal, called a “Drop”, where people who wish to eat the meal pay a specified amount of money for a plate of food, and “drop” the money into a bowl. Obviously there also needs to be people who cook the food too, and that’s usually the people who are involved in the group who are raising the money, but others who just want to buy a plate may also bring some food.

The Teop Translation Committee did a Drop for their first fundraiser. The food is laid out on the table and the ladies dish it up onto plates, which are then given to those who are buying a plate.

This was my plate of food at the recent Drop for the translation committee.

I had been to a Drop previously also to raise money to help an aunty who was in Port Moresby for medical treatment. Below is the plate I had then, and here is a description of what is on it, clockwise from top left: taro, fried flour cake, fish, rice, iobo with greens, banana cassava slice, fried cooking banana.

UC synod and food

The United Church in Bougainville held its Synod meeting at Kekesu which is in the Teop area. The UC congregations in the Teop Circuit had a big job of bringing the facilities at Kekesu up to a better standard. The church building got a new coat of paint, and the eating hall was transformed.

This is the inside of the church building, painted in light blue, which is the official colour of the Teop Circuit. It’s also beautifully decorated with brightly coloured cloths draped over the walls. There were flowers too, but you can’t see them in this photo.

This is the eating hall. It probably doesn’t look very impressive to you, but it is very different from what it used to look like. It was totally open at this front end, no wooden half-wall and no door. There are fly screens all around the walls now too.

The communities in the Teop Circuit were rostered to provide food for the people attending the Synod and they provided the best that they could. The day that we visited, there was pork and chicken at our table, among other things. The food was also very well presented with flowers and leaves decorating it. I haven’t been to any other even in the Teop area where the food was as fancy as this.

These two photos are of some of the food that our village prepared for the evening meal that they were scheduled to cook.

Big fish:

Big fish again and other decorated fish:

Translation committee meeting

We had the first meeting of the Teop Translation Committee in July. We were pleased with the attendance, and we were able to get an Executive Committee elected. It was quite interesting to watch how the meeting progressed. People who just happened to be going through the village were called over and added to the committee, including one man who got chosen to be the secretary!

Here’s a photo of the meeting in progress:

After the meeting, we had a lunch for everyone present. I now have a special dish that I cook to contribute to these meals. I’m not sure what to call it – tin meat coconut curry rice maybe. It’s in the purple-blue bowl on the right, next to the big bowl of plain rice.

Local food – “iobo” – Sea sausage?

We have this local seafood, which in Teop is called ‘iobo’, but we don’t really know what the proper English term for it is. We have heard it called a ‘sea sausage’, but I googled that and didn’t find anything that looked like iobo. It’s not a sea cucumber either. So if anyone out there reading this is a marine life specialist and knows what it is, please post a comment and let me know!

Here’s one that’s recently been caught. It is covered in sand, so you can’t really see it properly. Its mouth is at the end on the left.

Iobo is an invertebrate and it’s not a crustracean. It has no arms or legs, and it lives just under the sand. I haven’t been to catch iobo yet, so I can’t describe the process, but it is done at the reef when it is low tide.

They turn the iobo inside out to gut it, and it remains inside out when it is cooked and eaten. Here is some iobo on a plate.

So, what is iobo like to eat? Is it gross? No, it’s not that hard to eat. It has a bit of a fishy taste to it, as you would expect since it comes from the sea. It’s a bit rubbery like calamari, but it breaks down easily when you chew it (unlike calamari that hasn’t been cooked properly which you have to chew for ages).

I am quite happy to eat iobo and I don’t have an allergic reaction to it. It seems that some people do, as they have asked us, “When you ate it, did your skin get itchy?” and our answer is “No”, but obviously it does affect some people giving them itchy skin.

A plate of food which has one iobo going across it:

Sweet pawpaw

The pawpaws in the coastal parts of PNG are wonderful. They are really sweet and juicy and vary in size, from small to HUGE! When I visited Australia at Christmas and saw the pawpaws for sale at the shops, I was shocked at how small they are – even the smallest ones here are bigger than most of the pawpaws I saw in Australia!

The pawpaw that I’m showing you in this picture is not what we would call a really big one, it’s probably about medium size. It looks a bit green on the outside, but there is some yellow on the skin which indicates that it is fully ripe and ready to eat.

Party time! Village feast

In January, we arrived in the village to a hive of activity – the village was preparing for a feast that weekend. The occasion for the feast was that when one of our Uncles was driving to Arawa, he crossed a river which was high and it rolled his car. This was a situation in which he could have died, or been seriously injured, but he was fine, so this feast was celebrating the fact that our uncle had a dangerous experience and lived – definitely something to be thankful for.

Part of this celebration tradition involved washing certain people’s faces and feet with a combination of special water and leaves as shown in the picture below.

Lots of people came to our village for our feast and they all brought baskets of food for the feast. They also go back home with a basket of food too. Inside the kitchen house was very busy and full up with baskets of food.

The men constructed two special long tables for the feast food to be set out on. They were working on the tables during the week before the feast.

Some food was set out in the open on the tables, which invited the flies along, so several ladies and girls were shooing them away with various bits of trees. I managed to get in on the action too!

There was also some dancing and lots of hoots of laughter whenever someone new got up to dance. One lady got me up to dance, with reluctance on my part, though I think I got the loudest cheer of the day when I went up!

It was a really fun day and I think everyone enjoyed themselves, I certainly did. In the morning I went around from place to place in the village, seeing what everyone was doing and chatted to people. I got involved where I could – I helped with food preparation, sorting out the baskets in the kitchen and I also made a basket to be used to cook something.

Special occasional food

“Menaga” is the Teop word for a local dish that they make for special meals, like Sunday lunch or other special occasions. It can be made with taro, cassava or cooking bananas. Rebekah and I bought some taro and made some menaga. It is basically mashed taro, rolled into balls and coated in coconut cream. Here is a photo-story of the process…

First, we have to grate the coconut to get its flesh:

Then we put the coconut flesh into a press and squeeze out the cream:

We also boil the taro:

When the taro is cooked, we mash it in a big mortar and pestle:

We take the mashed taro out on the end of the pestle…

…and give it to the man who rolls it into balls – that’s traditionally a man’s job.

While he’s doing that, we go back to the coconut cream and boil it until it thickens:

Then we put the mashed taro balls into the coconut cream and mix well:

Now we can eat and enjoy it!

Women’s Christmas fellowship lunch

Before Christmas, we joined the local women’s fellowship for a lunch time gathering. In the picture below, you can see everyone sitting at the beach, and the table with

The ladies had organised a ‘Secret Santa’ or ‘Kris Kringle’ type thing a few weeks earlier, and today was the day that they gave their gift to the person whose name they had drawn previously. We hadn’t been involved in this (next time maybe!), but it was fun seeing the ladies’ joy as they gave and received gifts. The smiles in these pictures say it all:

Gas stove = easy cooking

When we returned to the village on 29 October, we had our gas stove with us because it was in the crate that we shipped to Buka and unpacked during our three night visit to Buka. We have cooked using it every night since we returned to the village and I am really enjoying it.

Here’s a photo of me on the first night we used it:

What do we cook? Well we bought a lot of tinned products in Buka and took them to the village and we use them mostly as well as whatever fresh vegies we can buy at the market or have been given to us. Some of the meals we have been cooking are: vegetarian korma curry, tuna spaghetti bolognaise and vegetarian creamy pesto pasta. The remaining meals don’t have very interesting names.

Survey trip food

We were so well fed during our survey trip. Often we were served two huge meals each day, and a snack at midday. Our tummies were working overtime digesting all that food, and I wasn’t hungry too often!

The food was served buffet style – all spread out on a table in different bowls, and we could fill our plate with whatever we wanted and however much we wanted, and of course we were always encouraged to take lots and come back for more!

At every meal there was usually rice, two minute noodles with greens, fish, sweet potato, taro and cooking bananas (savoury ones). Sometimes there was shellfish and I tried a few different kinds. I’m not a big fan of seafood, but most of the shellfish were okay. There was just one – a big one – that I couldn’t swallow – it was a bit gooey and gutsy. I threw that one out for the dogs, but I think the chickens actually got there first.

Here are some photos of the kinds of food we were served:

We were only served mud crab once – on our last morning of the survey. It was really nice.

Fruit (post by Bill & Liz)

Fruit is in abundance in the local markets, there were some fruits that were unknown to us, such as sugarfruit and galip nuts.

These pictures show pomelo, soursop, pawpaw and bananas.




In PNG there are many types of bananas, from finger sized ones up to really big ones. The bananas are really cheap in markets, only K2 (80 cents) for a hand of bananas, they don’t always look as pretty as in Australian supermarkets but certainly taste much better. Another banana that we are not used to are cooking bananas, these are treated more like potatoes and do taste like sweet potatoes.

Village – Kaikai (food) (post by Bill & Liz)

While in the village we ate as the locals eat. Meals mainly consisted of various types of potatoes such as kaukau (sweet potato), taro, Chinese taro, yam and cooking bananas. They were served with greens, which are various locally grown leaves of plants, similar in appearance to spinach leaves. Usually there was fish on top of it, either fresh or occasionally tinned. It was all served in a thin soup. Nearly always, they were huge meals and we struggled to eat them, especially when another family decided to feed us as well shortly after we’d already eaten a big meal!

At all the villages we visited, everybody was very generous with their food and friendliness.

Here we are eating on the verandah of our house.