Join twowildtides on the country challenge. Each week, we’re going to be heading to a new country (in spirit). Primarily, we’ll be cooking a meal from each country; but we’ll also be watching travel documentaries, reading travel blogs, and listening to music. During the global pandemic, travel is largely inaccessible. We want to reignite our wanderlust, satisfy our travel bug as much as we can, and learn some new things along the way. I have a feeling our bucket list will have a number of items added to it through this experience as well. We created a simple alphabetical spreadsheet with all the countries of the world, and each week we will draw a random number that corresponds with a country on the spreadsheet.
This week, we’re visiting a rarely visited country: Nauru. Nauru is a tiny island nation in Oceania– so tiny, in fact, that it is the smallest country in the world behind Vatican City and Monaco. Some interesting facts about Nauru: in the 1970s, it was one of the wealthiest countries in the world due to its phosphate resources; in the 1990s, it was a haven for money launderers from around the world; and by the early 2000s, the phosphate resources had dried up and the country plummeted to one of the poorest countries in the world; now, Nauru is one of the least visited and most obese countries in the world. For a more accurate and interesting deep-dive into these unusual facts, check out these articles: Dark Tourism of Nauru, A Dark History of Nauru, Nauru’s Wikipedia page, and this Wikipedia page about obesity in Nauru.
The national dish of Nauru, according to Taste Atlas, is coconut fish. We had Atlantic Cod on hand from our last trip to NL, which was the perfect fish to use for this dish. We followed this recipe by International Cuisine, except we used dried shredded coconut as we do not have access to fresh this time of year.
This was an incredibly simple and absolutely delicious dish. It took no time to make and the sweet, tangy flavours were perfection. We served our Nauran coconut fish with egg-fried rice and a summer salad. We can’t wait to make this again!
Let us know what you think!