Spicy Coconut Pilaf

Where rice grows, coconuts often grow too. In a rice landscape, the islands of darker green are the crowns of coconut trees which shade the villages beneath. The large number of recipes in this book that use coconut may reflect the importance of coconuts in tropical cuisines, or it may just be nostalgia for the fields and groves I lived among as a child.

However, this is not a Sumatran dish but a pulau from South India – a region, admittedly, that may have influenced Indonesian eati