Market Day!
Tasty Thursday edition 27: passage chickpea stew
YOU SEE: a pile of vegetables. Umm, Nica, isn’t that your stove?
I SEE: FRESH STUFF!!
***
Our first port in Tonga was Niuatoputapu, a small island with 3 tiny villages in the north of the country. They get a supply ship supposedly once a month from the capital, but the most recent one was 6 weeks overdue and, as you might imagine, supplies were . . . not. This doesn’t stop people there from sharing what they have; one woman in particular has made it her mission to help cruisers experience Tongan culture.
We were invited to the school fundraiser. This annual event (lucky timing on our parts) involves lots of dancing by many of the students, and money showered on them as they go about it.
We were invited to church, where the singing was majestic even though the service was in Tongan so I couldn’t understand any of it. I could stand up when the congregation stood, and sit down when they did too, so at least there was that.
We were invited to a couple of Umus, a traditional Tongan earth oven cooked meal. Umu is the name of the oven as well as the feast associated with it. One of these featured a whole piglet roasted and other traditional dishes; the other was a lunch time affair with deep apologies for the lack of “meat” - though there were 3 different kinds of fish, 2 additional kinds of seafood, plus sides of starchy tubers and papaya.
It was hard to tear ourselves away. But weather rules all in the cruising world, and windows to head south have been very hard to come by this season. I only get 30 days in Tonga without extending my visa, which cannot be done in Niuatoputapu, and I was worried that if we passed this window by it might be another couple of weeks.
Off we went to the Vava’u group, a 36 hour sail that turned out to be one of our most frustrating passages to date. The wind was from all directions, at all strengths, and I stopped counting the number of times we furled or unfurled the jib, turned the engine on or off. It was with deep relief that we dropped the hook - after dark, not our favorite thing to do - in a bay a couple of miles from Neiafu, the capital and main town of this section of Tonga.
When we woke up, the scenery blew us away. Mineral green water (even on a misty grey day - picture is not worth sharing here) dotted with island after island, some no larger than our boat. 4 turtles popped up a hundred feet away from the boat. I’m sure we’ll find our way back to that spot before we have to move on from here in a month or more.
Neiafu is a bustling metropolis, comparatively speaking. We presented our interisland clearance papers to the customs agent at the dock, took ourselves out for lunch at one of the many waterfront cafès, figured out how to get money from the ATM, and slept well.
In the morning, it was time for the market. Daily (except for Sundays). The last market we saw was in Pago Pago, where the only offerings were bananas, coconuts, and taro root. Before that? It might have been the sidewalk vendors in Huahine. The market we found in Tahiti was more crafts than food. The explosion of fresh goodies here, though limited to what is in season (and it’s wintertime), blew us away. Piles of cabbage, bundles of bananas. Taro and yams and tapioca. Pyramids of tomatoes alongside artfully designed handfuls of fresh ginger. Knobby orange-looking limes. Bags of bok choy and huge heads of lettuce. It was hard not to overbuy.
We spent $30 on enough vegetables to keep 2 boats happy for a while, brought it to the boat and washed it all in a bucket of water with white vinegar added. And then, because it was time to go sailing and the vegetables needed to dry in a place where they wouldn’t roll around, the stove (well-lined with towels) was pressed into service as a drying rack for the not-bananas and not-greens.
Lunch needed to be something that didn’t involve the stove. So I pulled out a jar of chickpeas from the fridge, chopped up some of that fresh ginger, added a couple of pantry ingredients and a healthy amount of curry powder. Pull out the crackers (Ritz! Triscuits!) and eat in the cockpit, watching for whales in the sparkling water.
Welcome to Tonga. I think we’re going to like it here.
***
Passage chickpea stew
Like many of these recipes, it’s more of a “seat of my pants” cooking rather than any specific recipe. For this, it was a cool night as we motor-sailed the last 15 miles to Vava’u after that frustrating passage. Something warm, bowl-servable, and not too hard on the cook seemed in order. We had 2 onions and 1 head of garlic left in the veg bin and a couple of carrots in the fridge. Protein in the form of already-cooked chickpeas was the base. I pulled out a can of ratatouille (one of those secret “cheater” ingredients from French Polynesia) and went to work.
Peel and chop a carrot into bite size chunks
Thinly slice an onion
Sauté those in some olive oil in a saucepan or a deep skillet
Add in a good amount of worcestershire sauce and some dried oregano.
Stir in the chickpeas, the ratatouille, and simmer until hot through. Really excellent with a good dollop of thick yogurt on top. If you have some leftover naan to use up, go for it!
That chickpea stew is just the kind of cooking I did on my boat. Sounds scrummy. And the produce market looked beyond tempting. But today I learned there's such a thing as canned ratatouille...adding that to my next grocery list.
The chick pea stew looks great!