A potted garden of veggies and herbs

In June 2009, I visited the inspiring eco-friendly country, Costa Rica. Coincidentally, I was reading Barbara Kingsolver's, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" at the time. Some of the food I ate in Costa Rica was incredible, and utilised vegetables and products that are available in the Caribbean too, but which we would never choose to prepare in the way the Costa Ricans do. For example, peewah featured deliciously in dips and salads. Meanwhile, in her book, Kingsolver describes the choice her family made to eat only food they had grown or slaughtered, or that came from the immediate vicinity of their Virginia home. Although parts of the book were irritatingly earnest, in general, I was inspired to try, in some small way, to change some of my own food buying practices - to try making things from scratch, and to attempt to grow more or buy more that was grown locally. Hence the requests for a pasta-press and yogurt maker. And too my revived interest in growing herbs and vegetables.


















I wouldn't say that I have a particularly green thumb. My grandmother and aunt in England both had gorgeous gardens which they tended with lots of love and attention. And although I enjoyed helping them when I was at their homes, I could never really muster the drive to create similar gardens where I've lived. And now I live in an apartment with no garden at all! But the good news is I have a roof "deck". It's really just a concrete square, but I've had friends over for dinner up there, and I decided to try some potted plants to see how they'd fare. The trouble is, it's a concrete roof, which means it gets super hot in the day. And with this dry season we've had, well, trying to keep any plants alive these last few months has been a huge challenge.

None-the-less, I bought a little ficus, and a miniature bamboo plant, which have already started providing some shade for less hardy plants. I planted a variety of seedlings: rosemary (in the direct sun, because it can take the jammin'); regular and purple basil (these can also handle lots of sun); dill (in the shade of the ficus); chives, mint and local lettuces. And you know, they're doing really well. I trim and harvest almost daily to add to my salads and cooking. And the thrill of picking your own freshly grown, pesticide-free herbs is quite something. And having the garden in pots means that it's much easier to tend - easy to weed and water and easy to access.

Next I'm going to try the pesky tomato and some wild rocket.

Some of the things I've had success growing are:
rocket
lettuce
basil (probably the easiest thing the grow!)
rosemary
chives
dill
mint

I still have had no success growing coriander - not even from seedlings. What am I doing wrong?

By the way, a really great place in Trinidad for buying seedlings is a little garden shop called Agriflora on Aranguez Main Road. They sell seedlings and more mature plants - lots of herbs and vegetables, and of course, flowering plants and shrubs.

Bromeliads

I know this is a blog about food and related things, but I was going through my photo albums this afternoon, and I came across these photos of the sensational bromeliads I found in Costa Rica when I went there on holiday with my great friend, Rachel, last year.

We stayed all over the place, but our last day was spent in the city of Alijuela, at a beautiful guest house on top the hill. The view sort of reminded me of Port of Spain. And the gardens at the hotel were quite spectacular. Here are just a few of the photos I took:

Making soda bread with Pauline and Leah

Baking bread is one of the great mysteries of life to me. In form one at high school, Mrs Cumberbatch tried to encourage us to make sweetbread, knotted bread and rock cakes. In retrospect, home economics class (taught at an all-girls school) seems like such a 1950s, sexist thing; a course to prepare us ladies to become heads of households and home-makers. But I digress.

Even way back in form one, I knew bread-baking was not for me. My dinner rolls came out like rocks that could give someone a buss-head if pelted hard enough. In my first season of Sancoche, I made the mistake of scheduling hot-cross-buns as a segment of a show. Well - after the kneading, raising, proofing, kneading and raising, it took us almost two days to shoot the damn segment. Never me and yeast-containing baked goods on tv again!













My great friend Michele's mum, Pauline, is from Ireland. Every time I go over to Pauline's house, I am plied with food and grog: "Oh come on, you must have a glass of wine!" And there is invariably a jug of milk going sour hanging around on the kitchen counter. This may seem a curious thing, but because Pauline habitually bakes soda bread, she's always in need of her home-made version of buttermilk (something it's impossible to buy in Trinidad.) She adds a little yogurt to a jug of milk, and leaves the milk out for 24 hours to sour and thicken.

Soda bread is so-called because it contains baking soda as a raising agent, rather than yeast. It's full of really good things like whole wheat flour, wheat germ and bran. You can also add dried fruit and nuts and a little sugar, if you like.

The other day I was liming by Pauline and noticed another jug of souring milk on the counter. She said she was going to be making a batch of soda bread and I asked if I could come over to help/ look on. She said yes, and we made a date for the following day.


By the time I arrived, Leah, Pauline's 3-year-old granddaughter, had already sifted all the flour, and with Granny's help, measured all the ingredients. She was determinedly mixing the whole wheat and white flours in a bowl. Pauline went about adding the balance of ingredients: salt, wheat germ, bran, olive oil, the soured milk, bicarb of soda and baking powder. She mixed everything up until it formed a fairly wet dough.













And then, without leaving anything to raise or proof or set, she divided the mixture up among three loaf tins which she put in the oven to bake. Punto finale!! Yay! And the smell! Wow, there's nothing like having the smell of baking bread in your home to make you feel completely safe and loved!

The bread was absolutely delicious. Heavy and toothsome - after eating a slice you felt full. Not at all like the store-bought breads you get here which are just like cardboard. Richard and I nearly came to blows over who would get the last piece. As it was, I carefully rationed the bread so that we could get two and a half days of enjoyment from it. I'm going to have to get the recipe from Pauline so that I can make it. It's too easy to make, and too delicious not to!

My father's books

I miss my father's home. Although Daddy had lived in Jamaica from 1997 until he died, and I only lived with him there for a year, his home was always my home. It was unpretentious and very comfortable. There were always his hundreds of books on shelves scattered around the house and in his study. His copies of Nabokov and Naipaul novels, his collection of plays and poetry from Borges to Walcott, Tony Mc Neil to Robert Frost, his biographies of famous writers, thinkers and politicians; he had books on the Mayans and Greeks, the world wars and the Nazis. They lined the shelves of every book case of every home I've ever known him to live in. They were always organised by genre and then alphabetically by author. Just like a library, even though he would never have called what he had a library. He would have thought that pretentious. They were just his books which went with him wherever he went.













The bookshelf in my Dad's study.

When my sister and I were sorting through his books after he died, I started considering them a 'collection'. But then, that's not the right word. A 'collection' suggests something that's a deified entity, that is stored carefully and rarely touched - revered for what it represents rather than its actual content and meaning. Daddy's books were very much intrinsic to his creative life. He read constantly. His favourite novels he read several times. And most of his favourite poems he knew by heart. All of his books bore the signs of having been read - they had faded and curling pages, many of them were covered in his annotations and underlinings. Some of them had ancient library stamps and the names of other owners scribbled onto their pages.

Even though no doubt over the years he lent out many books that were never returned, he still lent his books to friends and students, often recommending a particular story or poem that would reveal some truth that was specific to the person to whom he was lending the book.

The way he was with his books was exactly how he how he approached his life. The books weren't precious objects to him. They were only useful in-so-far as they were well-written or interesting. He didn't care a fig if he owned books that were rare or autographed. They were what he used everyday, to learn, to relax, to delight, inspire and to educate.

When my father found out that he was dying, all he did differently was to eat more ice cream and cake. He was exactly himself - writing, reading, teaching, sailing when he could, laughing, agonising: living. He told my sister and I that until you die you're alive. I think his one indulgence was to tell someone, "Fuck you, I'm dying!" when they suggested he stop smoking. His life was not more precious to him than his ability to live it.

Dad's books are all over the place now. They will no longer line the bookshelves of his home. They belong to me and to Saffrey. To his dearest friends and to strangers. There's a part of me that's confused about the dilemma nostalgia creates. Do we keep everything because it belonged to him once? But then, that would be to make those things exactly what he never did: relics, 'libraries' and 'collections'. What's the point of keeping an autographed copy of a shitty book, when there would be less space for something you might actually want to read?

Pollo Tropical - Yuk!

It's not a great feeling this. Knowing that the food was complete rubbish, it's hard to come up with a good thing to say about the new restaurant and drive through, Pollo Tropical, and that's hard for me. Let me think on it....

Oh yes, from the car the interior design of the new building on the south western side of the Savannah looked nice. Oh, and the food was reasonably priced. But the price doesn't really matter, nor the interiors, when you just wouldn't want to eat the food. Talk about bland, tasteless, non-descript!

Richard and I went to the drive-through to pick up food for us and his family. I wanted a combination of different sandwiches on the menu, they didn't have any sandwiches. So I ordered variations on their roasted chicken: with cassava in garlic; rice and beans; yellow rice with veggies; caesar salad; black beans.

It ALL tasted yuk! Bland chicken; soggy and wilted caesar salad (at least the croutons were crispy!); bland yellow rice; mushy boiled cassava with no butter, no garlic, no salt, no flavour! What a disappointment! I can't imagine that I'll be going there anytime soon. Nor would I recommend it to anyone.

A pasta adventure!

My Mum gave me a pasta pressing gadget for christmas. I'd been wanting one forever, and I'd finally remembered to ask. The wrapped present was surprisingly small - for some reason I'd been expecting a food-processor sized box - but heavy. I unwrapped the shiny new thing an put it away in the cupboard behind my blender and cheese toastie grill (never to be seen again, you might think!)

I'd actually seen Jamie Oliver make pasta once on the Martha Stewart show, and there was something about his assertions that it was dead easy that made me think, nah. That looks hard! So the pasta press was languishing in the darkness of my cupboard next to the kitchen aid mixer that I haven't used in 10 years! It was in grave danger of suffering the same fate as the mixer. Until my friend, Franka, posted a pasta recipe on Facebook. I knew it was the signal I'd been unconsciously waiting for, so I printed the recipe and sent an email to five foodie friends, inviting them to come over for a pasta-making lime. (hey - if the pasta tasted like rubbish or didn't do what it was meant to, at least I'd have had a good time with friends!)













My mum arrives first, and I realise I haven't even made up the first batch of dough (which, by the way, is meant to sit and chill in the fridge for at least an hour - crapadoodle!) Having never tried to make pasta in my life, I decide to change the recipe - 4 eggs, 300 gms all purpose flour, 100 gms spelt flour, salt and olive oil all mixed into a dough which you're meant to knead until it's smooth and pliable (it's meant to be quite elastic) and then, like I said, wrap in plastic wrap and leave it to chill in the fridge for an hour.

Be warned, whenever you see the pros mixing everything on a table top and creating a well in the flour into which easily (and neatly) fit the eggs, it's like that because they've practiced loads. On my first attempt, one of the walls of the well caved in and egg quickly ran out all over the counter while I tried desperately to contain it with my hands! The tirck is to start bringing the flour in from the outside to the egg very quickly, mixing all the while with your fork! (My mum, by the way, eyed with with suspicion and amusement as I went through this rigmarole: she, clean as a whistle, me, covered in raw egg!)

Once I knead the dough for a good 10 minutes I put it in the fridge to chill and make another batch, this time using 400 gms of all purpose flour. The women arrive and we spend forever chatting about what we're going to make. The consensus is ravioli in different shapes - circles or triangles depending on whether we're stuffing them with meat or vegetables. We settle on our stuffings. Mine: home made pesto with ricotta and bacon. Nicola's: bhaggi and ricotta. Michele: some exotic asian something with shrimp and water chestnuts.

Lupe assembles the pasta gadget (the only one among us with the good sense to look at the manual!). I get the spelt dough from the fridge (chilling for 45 mins) and we start.

























Guess what. It works!! Plenty hands on deck gently cradle the pasta as we roll it through the press, one notch at a time. Lupe, Mum and Miche are in charge of the pressing, me and Nicola the stuffing, and Gabby is making the tomato and mushroom sauce. We giggle and chuckle and talk rubbish and squeal excitedly: "We makin' PASTA!".

























I boil the delicate (somewhat lopsided) raviolis for about 5 minutes each. And mummy samples. We're in shock. They're delicious. We cook and eat and chat for the next several hours. Richard arrives and beats a hasty retreat to the bedroom (muttering something about Lilith fair)! And the women are completely thrilled at the Lillith Food Fair! Will I be making pasta from scratch anytime soon? Probably not. Was it a brilliant way to spend a night with friends? Absolutely!

Trying something new.

I've been meaning to write about this creation since I made it for Christmas dinner. But I forgot that I'd taken a photo of it (what's the point of recipes without photos?) and only just discovered it a couple of days ago.

In my family, we always make a first course for Christmas dinner, which, more often than not, is a seafood dish. My auntie's favourite such dish is shrimps in marie rose sauce in half an avocado. So I knew I wanted to do something with fish, and had asked my sister to bring some sliced smoked marlin from Jamaica (better than smoked salmon, I swear!) for whatever it was I as going to make. I wanted it to be interesting in terms of eating and beautiful to look at. I'd also spent anarmandaleg buying some smoked salmon here and some white fish. I looked through my recipe books for inspiration and found a smoked salmon terrine.

When sliced it was beautiful, because there were layers of colour: the pink of the salmon, white fish, dotted here and there with green capers and peppercorns.

So I set about making my terrine with caution and trepidation. For some reason, anything that looks like it could have come out of a Cordon Bleu cookery book absolutely terrifies me! Completely intimidating! Instead of using only smoked salmon for the outer layer, I added also my precious smoked marlin, and some inexpensive white fish formed the bulk of the internal layers. The dish was set in a custard of eggs, cream and creme fraiche (just add a teaspoon of yogurt to a cup of fresh cream, leave it to sit at room temperature for an hour or two, and you'll have creme fraiche) and a sprinkling of chopped capers and brine-soaked green peppercorns.

The whole dish was baked in the oven, then left outside to cool. I put two heavy tins of tomatoes or beans on top the terrine and then left it to chill in the fridge until I was ready to serve it. A day later, and I still didn't know how the terrine looked! You have to wait to cut it until you're ready to serve it and waiting is not something I do so well! So I was completely excited when it was time to serve it. With a very sharp knife, I carefully cut slices at maybe 2 inches wide, and the beauty of the terrine was revealed!

It was also, by the way, quite delicious. A good combination of textures and colours and tastes. Not so scary after all, and a definite crowd-pleaser!