Olympic Food Challenge: Vanuatu - Citrus baked fish in coconut cream

A couple of thousand kilometres off the Queensland coast of Australia lies the island group of Vanuatu.  The South Pacific islanders sent a team of five athletes to the Olympic games and one athelete to the Paralympic games but so far they have failed to pick up any medals.  I could really have done with bumping into one of them at some point as finding out about their food has proven to be tricky.

After what felt like an aeon I found a list of recipes on Travel Blog, a site I had never discovered before.  My eye was drawn to recipe twenty one of twenty nine, which is a Green PoPo Curry.  I then spent another lifetime trying to decipher what PoPo was* before deciding that a different recipe was perhaps the best way forward.  Citrus baked fish in coconut cream was the recipe that I settled on.

 
Apart from that fact that we have never cooked snapper before tonight, I really liked the idea of baking fish in coconut cream.  I failed to buy any banana leaves for authenticity, so I used tinfoil to wrap the snapper in.  I don't know if the leaves would have imparted any flavour but the fish was very tasty without it.  As the recipe asked for half a tin of coconut cream I used the other half to cook wild rice in as an accompaniment.  The rice was finished with lime zest, coriander and a couple of chillies.

If you can cope with a whole fish on your plate this is a dish well worth trying.  We'll be having snapper again in a couple of days, I hope it's as good as this.  Even if it's close I'll be happy.

*papaya, if you are interested.