I'll admit. I don't know much about this Carribean nation. I hear Grenada and sadly the only thing I can think of is that Rhianna is from Grenada.
Looking at the recipes from here one ingredient stands out - COCONUT! Almost every recipe up on this list has coconut in it.
I thought with a trip to the Carribean in order I would add my own favorite twist and taste to it - in this case by adding a Guana Grabber. A Guana Grabber is a cocktail from Great Guana Cay, an island in the Bahamas where my family likes to spend time.
I thought I'd share the recipe (as best as I know it):
Guana Grabber:
1 parts Grapefruit juice
3 parts Pineapple juice
1 part light rum
1 part dark rum
1 part coconut rum
Shake all ingredients together with ice and strain.
Add a tiny dash of grenadine for colour.
And with a cocktail in hand, it's time to start cooking.
Up first: Coo Coo with spicy tomato relish and plantain
This dish feels Italian to me - except with the coconut milk in the polenta its different. What a great taste and texture! And with the fresh basil and the coconut. Super refreshing.
I used muffin tins to shape the "coo coo" which worked well. I lightly greased them with olive oil just to ensure the polenta cups would come out.
The tomato relish was fantastic but I would make more! Not sure the relish that's layered in the cups but extra to go on top! I added extra relish with my own homemade spicy tomato chutney (made with a red wine vinegar).
The side of plaintains was difficult. It's ironic that given that we have several plantain trees on our property the best I could manage were the tiny bits in the picture below. Sadly I will be stuck waiting for more plantains - thankfully I have some on the tree and it shouldn't be more than a few months.
Main dish: Oildown
I have to admit the idea of this dish sets my healthy ideas towards food on edge. The idea of having the coconut milk split so there was oil seems so foreign to me.
This dish also proved a challenge to me in terms of ingredients. It calls for Breadfruit, Plantains and Dasheen. Well, it seems dasheen is a type of tarro. Which should be reasonable easy to find in the Pacific but admitedly not without searching. And to be honest, I didn't really look at this in time to check out the Otara markets. The Otara market is a local market in Otara, Auckland which has lots of amazing Pacific produce. A true authentic South Auckland experience.
They say you should eat local and given that I couldn't find the above ingredients, I decided to improvise. So, I added pumpkin and black carrots.
With all these root vegetables I under estimated the amount of coconut milk I would need to cover the dish. 2 coconut creams was not enough and so I added another can of coconut milk to try and make up the difference. Fresh thyme from the garden. Yum! My kitchen was so fragrant!
Almost an hour later later and it's reducing nicely. Except it's not spliting quite as well as it has in the picture in the book. I guess that's what I get for using some coconut milk.
In any event, yum! So filling and warm. It almost reminds me of a gratin but made with coconut cream. This would be a great, hearty dish for winter. Seems strange to see it come from the Carribean where it is usually so warm!
Dessert: Coconut Ice
In my mind, I expected this to be a bit like a sorbet or a granita. But it hasn't quite come out right. My food processor is on the blink so I tried to use the vitamix to shred the ice. Matt, my sous chef, was put in charge of getting the cardamom seeds from the cardamom pods. I had bought both but then realised that the recipe mentioned pods. WIthout knowing how many seeds were in a pod I thought i would try and use those. Turns out, on average there was generally 5-9 seeds per pod. This had a heavy cardamom taste and would suggest perhaps reducing the amount included.
I served my with banana - I would recommend refridgerating the banana when serving.
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