Papua New Guinea Day

The Papua New Guinean national dish, mumu, is simple and economical to make. Most recipes call for slow cooking over a pit of coals, or at the very least the use of a Dutch oven in an electric oven. We used a slow cooker and it seemed to do the job. Very simple, I threw in a layer of spinach, a layer of sweet potatoes, a layer of chicken, a layer of pineapple, another layer of chicken, and a layer of spinach, onion, and garlic, all drowned in coconut milk (that last step is very important). The meat cooks in the fruit juice, coconut, and garlic/onions, giving it a sweet but subtle tang.

As the meat was cooking we watched the first part of Guns, Germs, and Steel, where Jared Diamond talks about the Papua New Guineans and the unparalleled human and natural diversity of the island. His books go much more in-depth and are required reading for adults (example, some languages in Papua New Guinea are as different from each other as Chinese is from English). On the way to the store to get ingredients I taught Simeon facts about Papua New Guinea so that he could give the lecture at the map. He loved being the expert.

New Zealand Day!

Our son Christian chose New Zealand for his country day. We made the national dessert, Pavlova, a cooked meringue dish. Daddy learned that egg whites don't whip into a meringue in two minutes like strongly implied in the YouTube video (more like 30 minutes of hard elbow grease), and that next time they would be better off using an egg-beater. We used the homemade whipped cream leftover from the Pavlova for the fresh strawberries and kiwis, and to give it a slightly more NZ taste supplemented it with fish.

For the movie, we wanted to watch Whale Rider, one of Rachel's favorites and considered one of the best New Zealand films. However, neither the local library, the Baylor library, Netflix, nor Amazon carried it. Ditto Hunt for the Wilderpeople, and Once Were Warriors seems a bit dark for our kids, but all three of those films are on my get-to list. We thought about watching Fellowship of the Rings, but our library didn't have a copy of that either, so we ended up watching some New Zealand All-Blacks rugby instead.

Canada Day!

We've decided that once a week we're going to have a day dedicated to a certain country, where we eat meals from that country and watch a movie from that country (or a good movie we want them to see anyway that takes place in that country). Before we got married Rachel was heavy into international cinema, while I was a bit of an experimentalist foodie, and now our kids are old enough that we can enjoy these interests of ours with them. Hopefully this won't be something that sounds fun but dithers out after a few weeks. The rules are 1) you can't repeat the same country twice, and 2) we go in order from youngest to oldest on deciding which country we'll do. In our experience, whenever we give the kids an option it exponentially increases the fun that they derive from the activity.

So this week our youngest (3) wanted to do the "leaf flag country." We had a lunch of pancakes with real maple syrup and a few slices of Canadian Bacon from the Butcher's shop.

For dinner we found one food truck in Waco that served Poutine, the national dish of Canada: fries, cheese curds, and gravy (with mushrooms and beef in ours). It tastes a lot better than it sounds. All washed down with Canada Dry Ginger Ale (Rachel's favorite, which according to our brief Wikipedia research was in fact started in Canada).

At night we finished it off with another of Rachel's favorites--the first episode of the Anne of Green Gables 1985 Canadian miniseries. With all boys Rachel wants them to get at least some exposure to girlish things.