Mercredi Passion – Orient & Epices , Anse Vata, New Caledonia

Giant tagine

The first Wednesday of each month, the tourist board here organises a street fair down by the beach in Anse Vata. This month the theme was “Orient & Epices” roughly translated as “The East and Spices”. It was a lovely evening so we went for a walk along the promenade to build up an appetite first.

There were a variety of stalls selling local and “eastern” items including some big bags of vanilla pods at a bargain price l but I don’t think I’d get them through Aussie customs. Now onto the fabulous food stalls. We first hit a French Caribbean themed stall (not sure how that relates to the Orient?) – they were selling a wide range of sweet and savoury pasties. We went for a couple of meat ones (250 francs/approx $3.50 each) – they were tasty with slightly spiced ground meat inside but they would have been better if they were hotter.

We then homed in on the Indian stall which apart from anything else was the most crowded and I’m all for following the crowd in this type of situation. They had a huge range of little appetizer sized items all for only 50 francs each (about 70c). We made a start on the savoury side with chicken and fish mini samosas and little patties made from semolina and mild chillis – we went back for more as soon as we’d finished our trial batch. We held ourselves back a little as there were also plenty of sweet options. My favourite of these were little banana dumplings which were somewhere between banana bread and a doughnut – very banany without being too sweet.
We’d made the schoolboy error of eating too much too soon but managed to squeeze in a bag of Achas de Poisson (fish fritters - I've never seen the word Achas anywhere before?) from another Indian stall (500 francs ($A7) for a dozen although I got the last portion of the batch so I ended up with about 18! Again these were excellent but it would’ve been nice to have some sort of dipping sauce. I had grand plans to head back to the apartment and mix some onion into some yoghurt for a quick dip but needless to say our little bag of Achas didn’t last that long.....

Achas de Poisson

Lastly we couldn’t resist a portion of Moroccan tagine and couscous to takeaway (900 francs ($A12.50). There was plenty for the two of us when heated it for lunch the next day and while we’d thought it was just chicken and vegetable, Mr Jen in particular was glad to find a couple of spicy merguez style sausages in there too.

The monkey was fading fast so we had to head home before the entertainment began but there was a troop of Indian dancers all ready to go as we were leaving so I think the party was only just starting....