Cold weather = a great time for hot soup. (And hot chocolate!) Hot soup with a Caribbean flair is an even better way to ignore the outdoor chill. I was lucky to have tinned conch on hand when I decided to warm up my evening with hot Caribbean soup, but you could just as easily [...]
Now that there’s actually snow on the ground (the horror!), I’m thinking about the Caribbean. Hearty stews are a superlative winter dish, of course, and it’s always fun to haul out the fondue pot, but what I really want during the wintertime is to be warm, and what better way to do that than come [...]
Limes have a certain pizazz that lemons just don’t. Grapefruit doesn’t, either…in fact, not even tangerines can match up to a lime’s potential to play a sweet/sour role as a keynote flavor or background blend. A squirt of lime juice also lends a dish a Mexican or Caribbean flavor that an orange simply can’t provide. [...]
A note to my faithful readers in the blogosphere: today is a special day. Not because it’s snowing in April–which, while odd, is not entirely unexpected for Michigan–but because this is my 200th post! While we can’t share celebratory libations over the Internet, I thought I’d give you a bit of the tropics to re-create [...]
Also known as Jamaican pepper, allspice is the dried berry of the pimenta dioica plant. It tastes like a combination of cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and juniper–hence, its name “allspice.” Mayans used allspice to embalm their dead, Aztecs used it as an ingredient in their hot chocolate, and today most Americans use it in sweet baked [...]
