Well, 50% isn’t bad. This was all brought on by watching “Death in Paradise”, which is really making me want to go to Guadeloupe. But since that isn’t possible at the moment, I decided to cook out of my Caribbean cook book. This includes recipes from “The Caribbean, Central, and South American Cookbook: Tropical Cuisines Steeped in History” by Jenni Fleetwood and Marina Filippelli. I’ve had this book for several years, but only made something from it the past year.
This past week I made a Cuban Chicken Pie, fried plantains, heart of palm soup, Caribbean Vegetable Soup, Pumpkin Salad, Layered Potato Bake, and Jamaican Trifle. I was going to make crab cakes, but Dungeness crab is 40 bucks a pound. And being a good native Oregonian, I ain’t about to eat anything other than Dungeness. Okay, that’s not true. But anyways, I ended up just getting crab cakes from the fishmonger.
I’ve made fried plantains before. Anyone who has been to Central America should be very familiar with fried plantains, a very common side with almost every meal. Delicious. The Caribbean Vegetable Soup was very interesting. I’ve never had a soup with banana. It was very good, but I’ve never heard of a chayote ( a kind of squash). I ended up using zucchini. Worked out great and seemed pretty healthy. The Heart of Palm Soup was also delicious. Both were easy to make and I am really loving my hand blender. Makes creaming soups so much easier than dealing with the food processor.
The Cuban Chicken Pie was a bit of an ordeal. It took a long time to boil the chicken and prepare all the ingredients. Tasted darn good though, especially the creamy corn topping. The Layered Potato Bake with Cheese was much easier to make and also really delicious. It’s a good vegetarian meal with a fair amount of protein.
The Pumpkin Salad ended up being a butternut squash salad. The recipe said I could also use sweet potato. I figured if butternut squash is a good substitute for pumpkin pie, it would be okay for a salad. Not sure if that applied here, but it came out good. I would use less olive oil than the recipe asks for.
The final one was the Jamaican Trifle. There were no papayas at the store, so extra mango. I sure do love mango. The cream part was a finely chopped pineapple with whipped cream and rum. Very yummy.
Overall, the book is pretty good. The recipes aren’t hard to follow and they came out very tasty. Nutritional values for every recipe are at the back, which is very helpful.
So, I have about 60 cookbooks. Next I am doing a book I got from a restaurant in Singapore. If anyone wants to pick a number between 1 and 60, I can figure out which one to do after that.
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