Yesterday was Lotu Tamaiti, or White Sunday in Samoa. It's a day for everyone to dress in white and celebrate children (Lotu Tamaiti means Children's Day or Service). To celebrate, I made two common Samoan dishes.
The first dish is Pani Popo, sweet rolls baked in coconut milk.
It begins with a soft dough that has to proof for at least a couple hours. The dough itself includes half a can of coconut milk.
The other half gets poured over the balls of dough and baked in the bottom of the dish.
It's so satisfying watching bread puff up as it bakes.
The end product is a fluffy (yet still bready/dough), just-sweet-enough bread roll perfect for sopping up even more coconut milk from the main dish.
This dish is called palusami, which is usually made with taro leaves but can be substituted with spinach, as I did here. Usually it's also cooked in a traditional oven called an umu, and wrapped in a pouch of older taro leaves, but in this case I just used a casserole dish.
Spinach and onion are layered together and packed down into the dish.
Coconut cream (for added thickness opposed to regular coconut milk) is then poured on top. The dish is covered and backed until the spinach is softened and the coconut cream is thickened.
Once done, it's like creamed spinach with a bit of coconut broth in the bottom.
I served this meal over rice, but I wouldn't be surprised if Samoans simply drink the coconut cream that is left over in the bottom. It seems that coconut is the main ingredient in everything they make. It makes sense, as not many vegetables grow naturally on the island, and without much spice in the diet, coconut is a great way to add flavor to a dish. It's also a great way to add calories and fat to a dish, which means the food for Samoa was much more filling than I was anticipating. And while the names of the dishes sound exotic, most people have probably had creamed spinach and Hawaiian sweet rolls (though maybe not together) which are close approximations of the dishes I made (with the added ingredient of coconut milk).
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