I’ve learned a few new kitchen tricks for preparing my Fiji Dinners. So, watch out… You’ll be eating much curry, lolo and roti!

Each time I come and stay with my Fijian family, we exchange cooking recipes and methods. It is much fun!

This time, they taught me how to make Rololo – photo below – which is the coconut milk base used in traditional Fijian cooking. Hand squeezed and quite tasty. Just quite a bit of work to get it to the milk stage.

When we were done “milking” the coconut, I asked what they did with the meat of the coconut? To me the response was quite odd. They said, “throw it out. We only use the lolo.”

Hold on now… that seemed really funny to me, the meat of the coconut is still good and it is “shreaded so fine.”
I offered up a solution rather than throwing out the coconut meat. I taught how to make coconut pancakes….. simple…
Flour, Sugar, Coconut meat, milk and egg…. Fry it up in a pan….

“NICE” was the response I got from teaching the coconut pancakes… They will no longer be throwing out the coconut meat.

After that, they pulled out a bucket of dehydrated apples that someone gave them and asked “What do we do with these????”
I showed them how to make a simple apple compote and “top” the pancakes… Again “NICE” was the response.

Oh what a wonderful time we have in the kitchen…. OK, I’m still in Roti School, they are not quite “round” yet, rather, we joke about my roti looking like islands… All in good humor!