Pacific Island Review 3- Pucha Salad

Pucha Salad for dinner
From the Solomon Islands

The simple dishes made in the Islands, Pucha Salad is one of them. Mostly prepared in homes, this vegetarian dish is quite nice to have with baked fish or with other meals like curry eggplant but it’s even filling enough to have on its own. Pucha is really just edible fern that’s half cooked in boiling water and creamed with fresh coconut cream and layered with other vegetables like tomatoes, capsicum and onions. Everything about it is fresh and like anything from the islands, the coconut cream gives a natural sweet taste to the fillings. Another style of this half cooked salad dish is using Palmer amaranth shoots that can be found in Chinese shops around Sydney and the local way of scratching coconut to extract its coconut cream can be attempted. Not an ideal thing to try and make but when wanting that taste for the local food, anything is worth trying to do. 

Photo courtesy of G.Galo

-Melanie-