My desire for the fantastical would be fulfilled if a ten-bird roast was the centrepiece of my Christmas dinner. Of course, I’d have to be feeding a horde, and even then, there’s sure to be a good bit left over.
So what’s this ten-bird roast then? The simple answer is ten birds stuffed into each other then baked. The birds are all boned, and placed on each other with a layer of stuffing between each bird. The more common form of multi-bird roast is using three birds, usually turkey stuffed with duck that’s been stuffed with chicken.
Read the rest of this entry »

This could be the shortest book review I’ve ever written: ‘It’s a fantastic book, buy it.’
It’s what I’ve been telling all my foodie friends about Creole, the new book by Guadeloupean-born chef Babette de Rozieres.
Creole is an absolute revelation and I can’t remember the last time I got so excited about a book at first sight. It’s got to be one of the best cookbooks published this year.
From the vibrant, colourful cover based on the French Madras print seen in traditional costumes of the French Caribbean, to the evocative photos of food and French Caribbean life and the utterly tempting recipes, Creole wins on all fronts.
Read the rest of this entry »

I really don’t get the Christmas feeling in England as I did back home in Trinidad.
For a start, there’s no parang music on the radio, no vendors on the roadside with heaping baskets of bright red sorrel and of course, no annoying TV ads from Courts urging you to spend bad money on dodgy new furniture!
This year, however, I’m feeling more Christmassy than usual and I wanted to reflect this on the blog, so over the next few weeks, you’ll be getting Trinifood’s Guide to Festive Cooking.
Ideally, it should be a well-structured, highly organised series of articles that anyone can follow and succeed with. But I suspect what you’ll get is quite the opposite because it’s my first attempt at being extremely organised about my Christmas cooking.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been longing for pig foot souse for a little while now and I finally decided to do something about it. This feeling started several Fridays ago, when in Trini parlance, ‘ah ketch ah vaps’.
I sent a text to my friend and fellow souse lover Tami saying, “ah stop jes so and feel for souse”. Poor Tami who always receives texts from me at the oddest times about the things I feel like eating responded as my mother would have by asking “what happen girl, like yuh have a light?” To translate, ‘having a light’ is a term we use in Trinidad to describe someone who is haunted or in the extreme, posessed by a spirit.
Souse is a delicacy that divides people especially those who are squeamish about eating offal. As an advocate of nose to tail eating, I’m always up for a bowl of delicious souse.
Read the rest of this entry »

It’s National Game Week, a celebration of all things wild and wonderful. Actually, I don’t need a special time for game, because I’ll find any excuse to cook wild stuff.
One of the things I cherish most about living in the UK is having easy access to excellent quality game, from rabbits and venison to pheasant and grouse. In the Caribbean, where the hunting season generally runs from October to February, the game species include deer, wild pig (quenk) lappe (Agouti paca) and tattoo (armadillo) but you have to have hunting connections to get some.
I can vaguely remember my first taste of wild meat. It was manicou, a small marsupial or possum that’s actually regarded as vermin. My father took my mother and I to a dinner at his friend’s home and we had a lavish meal. I told the host that I particularly enjoyed the beef and he laughed slyly before revealing that it was in fact manicou.
Read the rest of this entry »

For years I’ve wanted to know if I could curry chestnuts in the way that people back home curry chataigne. As it’s autumn, you can’t miss chestnuts in the supermarkets. Most people roast them or buy them already peeled for use in any number of sweet and savoury dishes.
But chestnuts look so much like chataignes and in fact, the French word for chestnut is chataigne. I’ve also seen the chataigne we eat in Trinidad referred to as Guiana chestnut.
One of my favourite delicacies is curry chataigne, which I first ate at a traditional Indian wedding many years ago. I remember my mother urging caution as I ripped off a strip of roti skin, grabbed up some of the delicious nutty curry and shovelled it into my mouth. In her very proper way, she whispered, “don’t eat too much, it will make you pum plenty”.
That’s the main problem with eating chataigne, too much and you’ll be flatulent – violently so.
Read the rest of this entry »

The old folks say there’s nothing like a shot of rum to help get rid of a cold. I can’t say it worked for me in the last few weeks as I battled one of the annoying winter colds that just takes forever to disappear.
A few days before the cold sentenced me to bed for almost a week, I spent a wonderful Sunday afternoon sipping rums from all over the world at the UK RumFest in London.
The Rumfest was organised by Ian Burrell, one of this country’s leading rum ambassadors and featured a host of rums from around the world. So given the variety of rum on offer, we chose to avoid the rum we knew - like Appleton, Clarke’s Court, Mount Gay and Angostura - to try different rums.
Read the rest of this entry »