kūmara.
romesh dissanayake
as i get older, i crave simple foods. my palate has been bashed around too much from 12 years of working in cold steel commercial kitchens. a bowl of rice, some pickles and some broth and i’m happy.
i like the thin salty crust on the skin of the kūmara which snaps as you bite into it after you’ve baked it. for this, i prefer a starchy small kūmara which fits snugly in your palm over a watery engorged one you might find at a supermarket. purple or red, or orange is fine.
wash your kūmara in the sink under warm running water. rub your hands all over its surface. take note of each individual shape.
place the washed kūmara into a vessel big enough to contain the lot of them and cover them with water so that they are decently submerged but not drowned.
tip out a miniature pyramid of salt into your palm and from your palm into water it goes. Make the water as salty as a really salty thing. add more.
take the vessel, place it over your heat source — whether it be fire or electric, and leave it to bubble away and cook through.
you can leave the kūmara sitting in water after it’s done and go about your day or you could take it out and bake it if you would like to eat it straight away.
you could take the kūmara to the beach and place it over burning coals or hot rocks, or, if you don’t want to leave the house, onto a tray and into a moderate oven.
turning every now and then, roast the kūmara so that the skin dries out and blisters in places.
once you think they’re done, or you cannot wait any longer, remove them from the heat source, place on a plate — plastic, paper, porcelain or otherwise — and enjoy alongside other foods that make you happy.
romesh dissanayake (Sri Lankan Sinhalese, Koryo Saram) is a writer, chef and artist based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. He has written for The Pantograph Punch, Enjoy Contemporary Art Space, Migrant Zine Collective and A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand. Currently he is undertaking an MA in creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters.