Tasty vegetarian recipes with a Caribbean influence by Caribbean cookbook author Chris De La Rosa.
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This is a take on traditional Caribbean technique of cooking “bhagi” or greens especially in Trinidad and Tobago. You’ll notice that I also placed this within the vegetarian section of the website, so before the flood of emails… I wanted to point out that you can leave out the bacon and start with olive or…
With both Jamaican callaloo (aka amaranth, callaloo, chorai or bhagi) and Swiss chard both in abundance in my garden this summer, I thought I’d combine them both for a delicious vegetarian recipe. Here’s the thing, DON”T for one minute think this will be a bland or petty recipe since you heard me use the word…
I hated going with our mom and dad to pick peas (harvest pigeon peas) in our garden as it was always in the afternoon when my friends would be playing football (soccer) plus the heat between the trees (from the day’s sun) was stifling. You had to sort through fully developed peas and avoid the…
The Caribbean is flooded with pepper sauces and condiments of all kinds as it’s simply part of our culinary culture. The textures, heat level, ingredients, ways of preserving and overall vibrancy of them all are unique to the maker and individual island. In Trinidad and Tobago you’ll find a lot of chutneys and amchars, while…
As a young fella on the islands I knew this vegetable as the one our mom would sometimes use to scrub blackened pots with and to be quite honest, I was never a fan of it. As we’ve discussed before, that lack of appreciation quickly went away as I grew older. When dried the jingi…
My first true encounter with ‘good’ Jamaican festivals was breakfast at our friend Dino’s home in Portmore Jamaica several years ago. Imagine waking up to a full spread of festivals, ackee and saltfish, boiled green bananas and to top it all off, a piping hot cup of rich and creamy Milo! Moms (Dino’s mom) had…
I must mention that I used chicken broth in this recipe and you’ll find it’s listed under the vegetarian section of the website so please use vegetable stock to make this fully vegetarian as I didn’t have any left in the pantry when I was putting the recipe together. If you can’t source Jamaican callaloo…
As a kid I hated the taste and texture of okra (ochro) but I can safely say that it’s now one of my favorite vegetables to use in cooking. Soups and stews is not complete without a few okras in there, but pan frying them is still my choice. Our mom probably gets a good…
This soup follows on the North American way of roasting root vegetables during the colder months to intensify their flavors and to bring out the natural sweetness. I’ve been calling Canada home in excess of 20 years, so it’s only natural that I use this technique, but with a Caribbean twist. You’ll see me add…
I love ground provisions (yam, dasheen, sweet potato, cassava, eddoes, etc) with a passion, so I’m always looking for new ways to include them on my plate. Fresh cut fries (potato) is a huge hit in our home, especially the way I get then super crispy on the outside and warm and creamy on the…
Did you know that the tuber most people outside the Caribbean call yams are really a milder sweet potato? On the islands we have several varieties of yams and in this recipe I’ll be using Kush Kush, which is probably one of the more harder varieties to source. I recall as a young fella on…
I remember a few years back my cousin (jokingly) saying to us “my wife made me guacamole and roti for breakfast”. After the laughter subsided we soon realized that he may have a point. What we lovingly call zabouca choka in Trinidad and Tobago, is pretty much the same thing known as guacamole in other…
