RIGHT: Asaria and members of
her community in Lufa inspect local water courses with a view to building a hydro power plant
A fter a critical food shortage brought on by drought in the Goroka area in 2015-2016, the people in Asaria’s village in Lufa (Eastern Highlands) planted large quantities of sweet potatoes and cassava to better prepare ahead. However, this created a crop surplus and, rather than see this food rot and go to waste, Asaria researched preserving methods online, discovering manual grinders that could be used to process dried
vegetables into flour for longer storage. In 2017 Asaria imported her first grinder from
Trinidad and made her first flour – by peeling and thinly slicing root vegetables, sun- drying them for a full day, grinding the dried slices then sifting the ground meal through a big strainer to create fine flour. Soon people in her village started bringing their vegetables for her to process, and in 2018, Asaria started taking orders for grinders, selling 500 in one year! The idea grew to sell the flour to urban areas, with her next goal being to buy a
days when it’s rainy or overcast in the Highlands. Currently she can only make 5-7kg of flour per day. As well as expanding into fruit flours such as dried banana, other ideas are to use veg/fruit leftover waste to make stockfeed, and also sell packets of dried juice from seasonal fruits such as pineapple – “Mix with water and just have any time of the year”. – Hauslain Harvest
dehydrator to speed up the drying process, particularly helpful for
SHONAYE LESLIE TAPIOCA SAUCE
S honaye has given a ‘PNG blend’ to a traditional cassareep sauce recipe from Guyana (South America) that her Guyanese mother taught her how to make and which she gave the Gulf name ‘moika’ to make it more relatable to local customers. A medical resident (trainee doctor) at POM General Hospital’s pathology department, Shonaye said she was so busy that her
mother entered the sauce in the Lily competition, but given time she would like to develop it as a retail product. One of the biggest challenges is that the sauce’s unique flavour is unfamiliar to PNG customers, but she likened it to barbeque, black or tomato sauce in that it is a rich savoury sauce ideal for meat stews and curries or to eat with flatbread or biscuits. It takes half a day to prepare the cassava juice by peeling, grating and squeezing the raw vegetable pulp, before boiling it for three hours to remove cyanide (poison) and reduce it to a thick dark syrup to which spices are added. An advantage is that once made, it has a long shelf life of about three months. – Black Orchid Delight
VOLUME 38 2024
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