Amanaki Fo'ou Cooking Demonstration

Amanaki Fo'ou (meaning New Hope) is a group from US including Eric Shumway who are promoting healthy living to help the Tongans combat diabetes. They come yearly for a couple weeks. The podiatrists in the group and nurses teach wound care at the hospital when they visit. The others lead zumba, make keyhole gardens with Tevita Makahele (manager Liahona Farms), diabetes screening, and demonstrate healthy cooking. Sister Thomson was asked to help with the healthy cooking along with Sister Huni and her daughter Latu.

Sister Thomson, Nunia Huni, Kay Lotulelei

Front: Uini Hosea, Tiffany Shumway, Latu Huni

Sister Huni makes a wonderful talo stem salad. Amanaki Fo'ou group were a bit leery of talo salad as they know it has to be cooked. They thought stem salad would not be. But they agreed to let Nunia and Latu make this salad. It was a BIG HIT. They asked her to make it the second session as well.

To make the salad:
Cut stem from the fresh cut talo. Save leaf for lu.
Peel off the outer skin - like cutting strings of celery.
Cut in 4-inch pieces.
Boil.
Peel stem into sizes as at left.
Mix with lemon, a little sugar, tomato, lime.

We also served lettuce wraps with chicken, sweet and sour chicken, soup, sweet potato (kumala). We had a lot of fun working in the kitchen together.

Karen Fetzer (from Hawaii) discussed healthy eating with the group before we ate. She was very interesting and answered questions from the ladies.

I will not feel deprived when I bypass junk food. I will feel empowered because I made the RIGHT choice.