← For Teachers
🌍 Country of the Week · A Spin the Globe Teacher's Guide
Solomon Islands
Solomon IslandsOceania · This week's dish comes from Honiara
About Solomon Islands
Solomon Islands cuisine is Melanesian and root-crop-based, taro, sweet potato, and cassava with fresh fish and 'slippery cabbage' greens, cooked in coconut milk or the earth oven. The reef and garden feed the islands.
Slippery cabbage is aibika, Abelmoschus manihot, and the slipperiness is its mucilage, the same quality okra has; it is cooked down in coconut milk until it thickens the pot itself. The motu is the earth oven, and there is a small version where hot stones go straight into a covered pot rather than into a pit.
The ngali nut, a canarium, is the Solomons' signature delicacy: cracked from a hard shell, eaten raw or smoked over a fire, pressed for oil, and traded between islands. It grows in gardens and forest rather than being planted in rows, and it is the kind of food that a reef-and-garden economy produces and a plantation one does not.
The wider picture: Island kitchens where coconut and the sea rule.
This week's dish: Boiled Kumara with Fresh Coconut
Tender boiled kumara (sweet potato) tossed with fresh grated coconut and a little salt, an honest, everyday Solomon Islands breakfast.
Serves 4 · Prep 5 min · Cook 20 min · Difficulty: easy
See the full recipe: ingredients, steps and dietary swaps →
Grown-up jobs: any step that uses a hot stove, oven, boiling water, or a sharp knife is for a teacher or parent. Children can measure, mix, and assemble.
Discussion prompts
1. Find Solomon Islands on a world map or globe. It sits in Oceania. Which oceans or neighboring countries does it touch, and roughly how far is it from where you live?
2. Boiled Kumara with Fresh Coconut comes from Honiara, in Solomon Islands. Read its ingredient list together. Which of those foods do you think are grown or raised nearby, and how might the country's climate and landscape explain that?
3. Read the short story behind Boiled Kumara with Fresh Coconut. How have the people, trade routes, and history of Solomon Islands shaped what ends up on the plate there?
4. Compare Boiled Kumara with Fresh Coconut to a dish your own family cooks. What is similar, what is different, and what one question would you ask a family in Solomon Islands about how they make and share it?
5. After you cook Boiled Kumara with Fresh Coconut, add Solomon Islands to a classroom map and give it a stamp. Write down one fact about its food or geography that you did not know this morning.
🌍 Spin the Globe · Geography through food · spintheglobeofficial.com/for-teachers