Day 3 Interior…Culture/Food/Traditions

Saturday we were able to spend the day with a group of ladies preparing several traditional rice dishes.  We had a great time “cooking” with the ladies and “helping” them with whatever we could.  They were very patient with us while we “learned” and even though we couldn’t speak with all of them, that didn’t stop any of us.  The first pictures we are weaving ketupat baskets with palm leaves which were later filled with uncooked rice and then boiled with coconut milk.  These ladies made it look so easy to weave these little baskets, but believe me it was not as easy as they made it look.  We had a very gracious teacher that basically wove a basket on our hands and then Cori was gracious enough to teach us, in English, what to do.  I succeeded in making 3 baskets, 1 with my national teacher, 1 with Cori’s help and 1 on my own! =)


I am using a traditional coconut scraper to scrape out the inside of the coconut in order to have “grated coconut”.  Also this looked a lot easier than it was, but by the end of the 3rd 1/2 that I did I pretty much had the method down.

Melanie and Cori are making coconut milk here by soaking the scraped coconut in water and then squeezing all the water in the coconut out, what you have left over is a white watery substance that is coconut milk.

We had a lot of leftover rice so the ladies went out and cut down some bamboo that we then filled with rice and coconut milk in order to make pulut.


Cooking the pulut over and open fire.  Turn them ever now and then and then when the rice starts “growing” out the end of the bamboo you know that it is cooked and ready to be eaten.


Here the ketupat is cooking over and open fire in the coconut milk.


Eating the pulut as a “snack” before supper while we were waiting on everyone to get there.  The outside of the bamboo is cut off so that you only have a little bit of the inside fibers as a casing and then you roll it on the floor (or table if you have one) under your hand to loosen the rice since it is very sticky.


Everyone enjoying the “fruits of our labors”.  We also had a sweet “soup” of sorts, sorry I don’t really even know how to describe it.  Anyways, that is a look into our day of learning and participating in several fun cultural things.