One of the benefits of living on some of the most fertile soil in the world is that you can grow just about anything. One of the benefits of living among people who have known this for hundreds of years is that they’ve found a way to cook and eat almost anything that grows. The result: your yard is a veritable buffet!

Today I went with one of my friends and some of his friends to his family’s pineapple garden. Partly due to what I just explained and partly because of differences in mentality, however, this “garden” would have been unrecognizable by Western terms. There were no neat little rows of plants and no pronounced pathways between plants. In fact this pineapple garden wasn’t even just growing pineapple! There was pineapple…

…and chili peppers…
…and coconut……and cassava.

The real story of course is not WHAT was growing, but what we did with it. First we picked some pineapple, chili peppers, coconut, and cassava leaves…

Then we cut holes in the coconut and filled it with some of the uncooked rice we had brought along with some onions, fish, the cassava leaves we picked and a few spices. Next on the agenda was building the fire…
The general idea was to set the filled coconuts in the fire. After a while, the fire would boil the coconut water that was still in the shell and cook the rice. Meanwhile, we cut up the pineapple...

The end result was that we cracked open the coconuts and had an entire meal inside—supplemented by some chili peppers (which we ate straight up)…

...and pineapple for dessert.
Think of it as the local version of the hobo dinners you take camping in the States—only a little more natural! :)