Caribbean and Tropical Food

  Foods to ride out a natural disaster With the annual hurricane season upon us, our focus always tends to shift from regular foods to those we would eat in the event of a major storm. Storms tend to bring images to mind of flooding, rain, damaged property, displacement etc.  What do we eat at times like these? For the most part, we are told to go easy on what needs to be refrigerated and purchase more dry goods.  When severe weather comes, within a few hours, it can alter the existence of many. In short, the weather is a game changer that doesn't care about your social standing. It will level you out with the most damaging of treatments. If we're not careful, the despondency of such an experience can ruin our creativity as we go into survival mode.  As I ponder what we do with food in good times, a thought that came was how can we turn food to a form of delight during catastrophic times and boost the morale of survivors? What would we come up with using the ingredie...

  As you figured by now, I love what the Caribbean has to offer in terms of food. I am fully aware that there are others who know way more than me about the foods of the Caribbean and share their intrigue. If I may be so bold, I am going to share some well-researched and written articles about our food. Here's my list of what I've found: The 40 Best Caribbean Recipes   17 side dishes that will turn any meal into a feast    30 Caribbean-Inspired Recipes for a Tropical Escape With a little imagination, Caribbean foods can be quite creative and appetizing; never a bored moment when it comes to eating well and within budget. Some of these foods were forged out of hard times experienced in the Caribbean and made popular by the curious who fell in love with the end result.  Some of these recipes resulted from experimentation when the battery of ingredients to make a dish had to be substituted. The variations are wild; exposing the eater to a wide range of culinary exp...

 Going to hotel school was one of the best things that can happen in the life of anyone. It has a way of preparing you for life through a course of studies that enables you to understand what you previously took for granted.  There's so much more to food than just putting a collection of ingredients together because that's what an older family member did and call it a dish. They may have done this out of necessity not realizing that some of what they did has its beginnings in classical cooking.  Questions surrounding consistency, portion control, yield management, texture, and colour, to mention a few develop their meanings when someone takes the time to study the processes and break them down in a manner that the methods can be taught and the outcomes are consistent.  I remember having to learn kitchen French since if you had the opportunity to work in an international environment it was necessary to understand and be understood when communicating within a fast-pace...

  Have you ever encountered hard times while growing up in the Caribbean? Parents often told their families that they were to eat certain foods because "they are good for you". They never said good for what. It is against this backdrop that I have always questioned what foods do within my body. As I age, I became even more interested since when life began at 40; no one ever said what it would begin to do. Finding out is experiential. The wear and tear on our bodies over the years seem to start manifesting themselves at this stage. Perhaps it's time we stop taking things we eat for granted and begin to understand exactly what they do within our bodies and why we should consume them the way we do. I am suspecting this may take more than one article. There are just so many foods that we are yet to understand their relationship within our bodies. Here are a few: Breadfruit; As quoted from this source - click link :  It is an excellent source of proteins, essential amino acids...

This isn't an article that excludes or alienates other races, but one that celebrates blacks through cuisine.  We have a long legacy of creating scarcity meals that would satisfy a family's hunger with minimal resources. When you look at the surface, the black family had many mouths to feed back in the day. It's not like now, when careers have resulted in shrinking families, at the time, the thinking was different and family was a way of ensuring that you had a means of support as you aged.  We were always told, "Your strength goes through your mouth", with the adults saying at the time, "I love to see children with a hearty appetite". If you were lacking a healthy appetite, we would get shark oil with B complex, or other fish oils. Cod liver oil, Geritol, and others. Who remembers Sonatogen Tonic Wine?  Meal times were when families got together and shared, not only food but what their day was like and the experiences they encountered. If friends of you...

  Regardless of where you live in the Caribbean, we all look forward with expectancy to a good Sunday meal. It's a one-time meal where everyone can get together and share in fun and fellowship for great and memorable times.  Whatever your diet, there's something for everyone around the Sunday meal. Vegan, vegetarian, meat eater and any combination of these ways of eating. Keto, paleo, and so forth.  However, we have often heard people say at some point in the journey of life that they don't want to eat the same old same ole. They want something else different.  Now these pictures show Sunday meals from a variety of places in the Caribbean. They form part of the culture of these countries. Why do these meals seem to be similar? It goes beyond the actual food and goes into the cultural values we developed over many years.  Why don't we eat like this during the week?  How did these become the food of Sunday?  Why don't we eat on Saturday, choosing simple ...

 If you ever had the opportunity to sit around listening to the elderly in our communities talk about food when they were growing up and your ear was keen, you would pick up on a few things. They had a process by which they managed food from the way it was grown, stored, cooked and even consumed. Their methods ensured that they had enough to last the family for a prescribed time, and their measured usage ensured that they contained costs as money was quite scarce.  We now put all kinds of fancy names to what they were doing. If you ever studied food and beverage, you would recognize that some of these practices are age-old and formalized in a manner so they could be taught academically.  Let's cast our minds back with them and examine the benefits of what they call ground food. We would recognize that eating this way had benefits as those older generations were strong - mentally and physically, in a real way, not having to rely on a gym or other stimulants to get going. T...