When I cooked for my friend Krista’s baby shower recently, I served Quinoa Tabbouleh as the starter and it went down very well with the ladies that afternoon. Tabbouleh is a Middle Eastern salad that’s usually made of bulgur wheat, tomato, cucumber, finely chopped parsley and mint, and also seasoned with olive oil, lemon juice [...]

One of the things I miss most about living in Trinidad is cold coconut water. Not water from a pack or a tin but from the coconut, fresh (almost) off the tree.   For most people who live or work in the capital Port of Spain, the place to head for coconut water is the [...]

I read an interesting stat in a tabloid magazine that said the average housewife knows how to cook just five dishes really well and sticks to those in some shape of form for most of her married life. I dismissed it because that statistic doesn’t apply to me, my mother or in fact, most of [...]

One of the best things about a visit back home to Trinidad & Tobago is, of course, the food. Before I left London for my recent visit, I got the usual talk from my friends about what I should eat on their behalf: “Girl, when yuh reach home, eat ah doubles/roti/bake and shark fuh mih, [...]

South Carolina based Trinidadian chef Renata dos Santos believes that cooks in the Caribbean must be adventurous and use more local produce in their desserts. Her advice is to “challenge yourself by using local fruits or vegetables as the main flavour!” Why not have a go at making her Mango Cheesecake with Coconut Crust? Yield: 12 servings [...]

  The first Indian food I ate in the UK was bloody awful! It was an oily mess that managed to be spicy but somehow utterly bland. It was cheap and watered-down food from a bog standard takeaway. It wasn’t until I visited Manchester’s Curry Mile and Southall in west London that I learnt about the [...]

  “Nah, I not eating no chicken wing! Woman, is breast or thigh for me please!” said the man to the exasperated food vendor. “She mad to be giving me wing,” he grumbled as he collected his overfull box of Creole food. It sounds funny doesn’t it? But it actually happened several years ago at [...]

Colette Burnett has a range of Caribbean-inspired wings on the menu at her New York takeaway Super Wings and they all make for perfect sharing dishes. The thing about wings is that they’re cheap and cheerful. You could pick up about 10 wings for the grand sum of a pound in the supermarket, but they’re not [...]

What do most people do these days when they want a recipe? In the old days of the 20th century, they’d probably look in a cookbook or food magazine or call a foodie friend with lots of cookbooks and beg for a copy of the recipe. Nowadays, most people – including me, the owner of [...]

Reggae singing celebrity cook Levi Roots has published his first cookbook, the Reggae Reggae Cookbook! I haven’t bought it yet but I had a glance a few days ago and it looks great. It’s going to be a massive hit for lovers of Caribbean food and food. I applaud Levi (whose real name is Keith) [...]