Wedding talk

20 kilos of flour and who knows how much coconut milk

Last week I spent a bunch of time helping out and hanging out with a couple of good friends' wedding activities. Here on Clove Island, couples will often get married but then wait until they have a lot of money saved up to do the big wedding that's composed of multiple events. Here's a bit of what's involved in a wedding:

1) lots of cooking.

2) flower necklaces

3) family fights

rolling the dough

4) stressed out brides

5) dancing

6) pictures

Of course, to write about all of this in one post would be quite the long post, so here's the first installment of "wedding talk"  --- Cooking.

During the wedding week, the bride's house (and the groom's too) is filled with women. Some women are making cakes/goodies for the exchange of gifts from one family to another, some women are cooking food for the bride to gift the groom, and some women are cooking food for everyone who is gathered at the house to work.

Since it's the hot season and the bride's house isn't very big, the women decided to cook on the roof. They put up tarps to shade from the sun and brought tons of coconut graters, knives, pastry boards, pots and basins to the roof.

ready to go!

When I arrived, the coconut grating had begun. Having instructed the bride that I wanted to help, not just sit around, the women gave me some coconuts to work on and I started getting to know them better. The coconuts grated, we began making the milk... and it started raining. Oh no!

Quickly we moved things to places where the tarps didn't have holes. But there wasn't enough room to really work, so we stood for a couple minutes discussing what to do next. Islander women can get LOUD in those discussions.

And the tarps started breaking.

frying on the roof

They'd not been strung up for rain, they were put up for sun protection, and the water had been pooling in the centers of the tarps, putting stress on well-worn corners and causing them to start bursting. You would have thought we were being pelted with water balloons, with all of the screaming, laughing, and running to get out of the rain!

Well, then we had to move inside. Eventually prep moved downstairs inside the house, and the rain lessened to allow for brave women to fry things on the roof while getting slowly drenched.

Every following day included more cooking, but that was probably the most excited part of it. I got a blister on my finger from cutting an insane amount of coleslaw without a cutting board. We had eggplant imported from the French island just for the wedding. And... just more normal cooking stuff.