Ascension Island Rice Salad

Your author swimming in Comfortless Cove. I thought it was time for a nice header photo.

Some of you who have known me for a while will know that this is not my first time with a restricted food supply - in fact, it’s my fourth if you include my 3 months of elimination diet where food was available but I wasn’t allowed to eat it. This recipe comes from one of the other times, but more about that below. It’s loosely based on an Afghan recipe from the Snackistan recipe book by Sally Butcher (highly recommended).

Ingredients:

• Cooked rice (ideally brown, I’m using leftover rice from lunch)
• Something resembling a salad vegetable if you have one (I used my last spring onion plus some Korean pickled radish for crunch - impatiently awaiting my next veg box delivery)
• Dried fruit (I’ve only ever made this with apricots, I could see sultanas working too though)
• Something a bit crunchy, like chopped nuts or seeds (I found “protein salad topper” in my cupboard, which is basically just pumpkin and sunflower seeds roasted with some tamari and salt. I’m also scraping the last bits out of my jar of dukkah- that’s not actually dulce de leche as labelled)
• Basic dressing ingredients (oil, vinegar, pepper)
• Pickle. The pickle is important. I use lime because it’s my favourite

Also toss in anything else from your cupboards that might work, I got out my nutritional yeast flakes because why not. 

Tip the rice from your rice cooker into a bowl. If you’re squeamish about room temperature rice this recipe is not for you. Although you could probably make something very similar with couscous or the like. Chop your vegetables and dried fruit to appropriate sizes and add to the rice.

Make a dressing with oil, vinegar, pickles, salt, pepper etc. Please admire my pepper grinder while you’re here. It belonged to my grandparents and the only way to fill it is by putting individual peppercorns in the hole at the top. Doing this was my special treat as a child. I still enjoy it.

Pour the dressing over the rice, stir, adjust quantities as needed (as pictured it wasn’t quite enough so I added a splash of each). Top with your various crunchy and additional ingredients.

Serve with freshly caught and barbecued tuna.

So. This recipe became my speciality when I worked on Ascension Island (pictured above) in the summer of 2014. Ascension is a tiny remote rock in the South Atlantic where basically nothing grows except Mexican thorn (inedible) and some guavas (boring; people made jam). Before I went I got to make a Waitrose order for non-perishable food that then got transported there by MOD supply ship. Fresh fruit and vegetables were basically non-existent (except on the air force bases, where I wasn’t). Supplies came in by boat from South Africa every few weeks but things were raggedy and expensive, so we just kind of made do. The one thing you could get was fresh fish, more or less just by holding a piece of string in the water - we ate tons of tuna and wahoo. People had barbecues approximately every other day, where they’d do the fish and you’d bring booze or side dishes or dessert. This was my standard. (I did not have Korean radish on island. But I did bring lime pickle. I'm not a barbarian.)