After cooking white curry & boiled the yam for the next day breakfast also, there were lot of Taro roots(Kiri Ala) left at home from the harvest that was dug out yesterday! Suddenly I got this idea to make few more dishes but not in the traditional ways but with a modern twist. Do you know friends when this Root yams are burned in a very hot charcoal wood oven, you get an entirely rich and nutty taste than the taste that you get after boiling them. Since I thought to bake some pumpkin buns for the tea, I took that chance & burned the yams in the same hot wood oven. It was very hot standing near the oven, so I put my sweet innocent magic words to our brother and got him to burn the Taro roots for me! After all that’s what brothers are for isn’t it? Yet he did the baking with a big fuss! Well I know the only reason, why brother is willing to help with these tasks amidst a big fuss,....because he get to taste-all my dishes at the end!

You get a very nice golden color in the pumpkin buns when baked in the wood oven. But remember since the temperature inside the oven varies, the buns also get baked in uneven tones of color which is somehow beautiful in some cases. You know there is a very unique spread of color tones as well as the baked food gives a different tastes when you are biting into it. There were lots of baked Taro roots( Kiri Ala), So i powdered them into a yam flour with bits & mixed it with some other flours and made a considerably thick batter. The Taro batter fried chilies came out giving an exceptionally good look to the dish as well as a taste than I expected mainly I was using red and green chilles. I was very happy that both of these dishes came out very well and became the star treats of the evening tea.

The lush green pandan bushes of the opposite side paddy field brought nostalgic memories to me. When me and brother were kids, we used tear off the pandan leaves from the very same bushes and made small pandan leaf boxes to put the fake rice that we cooked with our own kiddish imaginary cooking. How sweet were those childhood memories. Now of course these pandan boxes are being used for different traditional dishes. I would say brother is an expert in making these pandan boxes so methodically and neatly. You can guess now why I gave him the task of making the pandan leaf boxes, isn’t it? As alway he is an expert in eating those goodies as well!!! I filled a mixture of hot sago mixed with the bunt root yams into the pandan leaf boxes. I used hibiscus flowerse to color them. That unmistakable fresh taste of the pandan leaves will get mixed with the sweet hot sago dessert when you pour the hot sago mixture into the boxes. I must tell you that in our country it’s very rarely that people use pandan leaves in sweet desserts as a tradition. But the taste and the fragrance of this dessert got beautifully enhanced by the pandan leaves!