A kumara is also known as a Māori potato or sweet potato and has a rich honey-like flavour to it. Nowadays we eat them in much the same way as the common or garden potato - roasted, boiled, mashed etc. My personal favourite is kumara chips with a little garlic aoli on the side. You have to try them if you ever come here. Yum! Way better than poutine!
Kumara was traditionally cooked in a hāngi, which is a kind of barbecue: a pit of hot stones in the ground, layered with food and then covered to cook. This is a hāngi.
Sucking the big kumara is not to be confused with a similar phrase: suck it and see. This is used when you come across something new that you don't fully understand yet. One would "suck it and see" upon entering a World of Warcraft dungeon for the first time, for example. It means trying something new to see whether you like it. Try this experiment: cut a lemon in half and stand with it in front of a brass band while they're playing. Now suck it and see what happens!
I did not enjoy sucking kumara...big or otherwise. :(
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nonono. That's just 'sucked the kumara'. Sucked the _big_ kumara is died...
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