Food

Yay! We are back online after a 52 hour long power outage and even longer (like five days) before my cell provider’s network coverage was fully restored to the area where we live.

Back to the topic at hand…

For the first eleven days we were here we ate like royalty. Sis. McLean is one of the finest home cooks I have ever encountered. And when you consider the limitations of things she is dealing with as far as availability of ingredients, I can’t think of anyone I know who could put on a better home cooked meal here. I sure can’t. For my first home cooked meal, I made a southwestern scramble; sautéed up some garlic, onion and green pepper with some homemade breakfast sausage and added some eggs. Timothy had leftover meatloaf as he is not a big on eggs.

Meal #2: Burgers, Fried Plantain and Boiled Potato. I was thrilled to be cooking plantains in hot oil. I was thrilled to be eating them. Stephanie and Timothy… not so much. A little disappointing, but that means the leftovers are all MINE!

Bought a paw paw. I had no idea what that meant. Did I mention that the oranges here are green? Very tasty. Tasty as the tastiest Florida’s best in January. Tasted the paw paw. It’s kind of like a cantaloupe that tastes kind of like honeydew. Not really. But since I don’t like either of those melons I didn’t really take a liking to the paw paw. Stephanie didn’t mind it.

You have to be careful with the eggs. You have to break each one into bowl by itself to make sure it doesn’t contain . . . how can I put this delicately for you vegans out there? You want to make sure it hasn’t progressed beyond the egg white / yolk stage of chick development. Too much information?

We are going to eat a lot of eggs. I can sense it. It’s one of those things that is easy to prepare, cheap, predictable, and did I mention easy to prepare and cheap?

Let’s see… what else is in our larder? Pineapple. We were pleased to discover that Timothy LOVES fresh pineapple. He eats it up first and asks for more before touching anything else on his plate. Beef, pork. The McLeans have an electric meat grinder. It helps enormously. For beef, you just buy the whole cut (all the cuts are priced identically) and grind the whole thing. Filet or chuck, arm or sirloin. It all goes in the grinder. For pork, you have to call the pig guy. He’ll kill the pig for you but then you get to cut it up, feed it into the grinder and add seasoning as befits sausages. Chicken I do not think we will bother with. They are tough and stringy birds here and more than I am inclined to mess with. But check back with me in a couple months. Maybe I will change my tune.

Bottled coke. Yum. Fanta. Um, I don’t like it as much as coke. Krest Bitter Lemon. That’s a new one. Unique. I like it. Kind of. It’s like a carbonated lemonade made with about one fourth the amount of sugar you’d normally use to make lemonade. I have been drinking Coke like it’s going out of style. At least one bottle a day, sometimes two. They’re 35 cl, which I think translates to something like 12 oz.

Shortbread. I couldn’t resist buying a small package one day. Five precious squares for $1.50.

Rice. Lots of rice. I tried making rice pancakes from rice flour the first week we were here. They were more like crepes. Good, but not the intended result. Stephanie had a similar difficulty. We need to decrease the amount of liquid in subsequent attempts. I made a spicy rice dish using one of the local peppers. They are very hot! If an habañero or a scotch bonnet is a “10” and a jalapeño is a “2” or a “3,” I would say these are something like a “7” or an “8.”

I love the food here. I would eat something different every day of my life if I could. Of course I am sure there are things I would want a second time… I could see myself growing weary of avocado. I think I’ve eaten something like eight of them in the last twelve days.

I’ve been making french fries for Timothy. He LOVES french fries.

Yams? Not. They are a staple here. They’re not like the ones back home. I intend to try cooking one soon.

It’s too bad mango season is nearly over. I really like mango. Bananas are ubiquitous. But sometimes more expensive than one might expect. One day I spent $2.10 for about a dozen small ones. Another day I spent $.60 for about seven or eight of a similar size. I think I bought both sets from the same vendor and they were of a similar quality. Pricing of items can make no sense here sometimes.

Let’s see… what else. Did I mention the Golden Toast? It’s one of the two restaurants the McLeans will go to here. They had some . . . shall I say “unique” items to choose from? In addition to some of the staples, coconut rice, jollof rice, moi moi, puréed yam, they had snails (big or little), scary fish, gizzard-kabobs . . . shall I go on?

I didn’t feel like cooking anything one night recently, so I headed to the Golden Toast and ordered coconut rice (to go with my limed avocado at home), and for Stephanie, spaghetti and a meat pie. The rice was surprisingly spicy and the meat pies were surprisingly tasty. The spaghetti went missing. They ended up giving us double the rice. Oh well. Better luck next time. Stephanie was content with the meat pie.