Unsurprisingly, tuna rules... Smoked (valhomas), fresh, or canned, it's delicious.

It can figure in tasty curries, of course (as can pretty much anything else).

Most spectacularly, however, big chunks of fresh tuna are the centrepiece for garudhiya. The fish is served in a clear soup flavoured with onion, curry leaves, and red chillies. It is accompanied by steamed rice and a plate of condiments (in our case, green chillies, red onion, pieces of lime, and bilimbi, which are small green torpedoes with a texture like rose apples and a deliciously sour taste).





More humbly, but very tastily, tuna is one of the key elements of that fabulous Maldivian breakfast, mas huni. This is a delicious, totally addictive mixture of tuna, coconut, onion, chilli, and lime, which is served with thin flatbreads called roshi.

A less frequent but also excellent breakfast alternative is kulhimas, a dry tuna curry, also good with roshi.

Tuna (or valhomas) was my favourite version of kothu roshi, which consists of shredded roshi fried up with almost any combo of protein and/or veg. We've had something similar in Sri Lanka, but this dish is certainly ubiquitous in the Maldives.

On Himandhoo one evening, we popped into a little bakery, and the shopkeeper talked us through the range of goods in the cabinet. Apart from one lone fairy cake, the other five or six types of items all involved tuna... So we bought some tuna in pastry discs and some tuna cake (kulhiboakibaa), and took them off to the beach to eat at sunset. Both were spicy and delicious, but I particularly appreciated the cake, savoury cakes being monumentally under-rated, in my view.

Himandhoo also exemplified the supply problems that small islands have to face.

On our first full day there, we headed for the lunch place our landlord had introduced us to the previous evening. The waiter carefully explained that there was no seafood, so we ordered kothu roshi, and they phoned for the cook to come. The waiter then returned to say there were no roshi, "not in the whole island", and would noodles be OK? Noodles here means instant noodles, so we asked if there was rice. No, he said, we're waiting for the boat to come, so there's no rice, "not in the whole island". OK, we said, noodles it is. We'd ordered fresh lime juice, and after a little while the unfortunate guy came back to explain that there were only enough limes for one, and the shops were shut, so could one of us choose something else, maybe Coke or a banana milkshake? We eventually established that fresh orange juice would be possible, and ordered one of those.

The noodles were OK. They had made them reasonably spicy, which is always an advantage.

Afterwards we asked if we could have coffee, having seen Lavazza on the menu (Lavazza has totally taken over the posh coffee market in the local islands, it seems...). "What kind of coffee would you like?" asked the waiter. "Lavazza," we said. "Oh," he replied, "The Lavazza was finished yesterday. We have Nescafe, or Nescafe with milk." We decided not to bother, and paid up, scouring round for change when he started like a frightened colt at the sight of our 500-rufiyaa note. As we left, he asked brightly, "Would you like some nuts?"

The following day, we ate at a different place, and encountered no difficulties. Whether this attests to cannier provisioning, or whether the boat had arrived that morning, I cannot say with certainty.

Anyway, back to fish, which is not always tuna, of course. We were served very good reef fish at the Ocean Grand, and some tasty little critters for our picnic off Rasdhoo ("the head is the best bit," said the guide, "nice and crispy" -- and it was).



We ate a lot of fruit, and the papaya always seemed particularly good. Bananas turned up regularly (and however snarky we might be about the baleful culinary influences of conservative tourists, there's always something cheering about a banana pancake...)



Breadfruit proliferates on Himandhoo especially. The only way we got to taste it was in the form of breadfruit crisps (both the sweet and the savoury versions). But breadfruit is extremely versatile, and I regretted not having the chance to taste more of the things it can be made into.

And we can't leave out Lolly Polly in Hulhumale, who served up our end-of-anniversary splash of ice-cream with colour and verve: