Our trip to Jamaica in the spring left us craving a little more spice in our ordinary foods and a few more Caribbean dishes in our weekly menus. Here are a few dishes that we kicked up a notch after our travels.
Rice and Beans
Mel was super excited recently when DJ's mom gave her a rice cooking tip that made preparing rice and beans a lot simpler. The next step: the work on flavors. So post-Jamaica, she got a bit adventurous. Instead of just adding butter and salt when mixing rice and beans, she also added a couple of dollops of jerk seasoning.
The end result: still not perfect, but definitely much more flavorful than any batch she's made before. The next step will be to get the consistency right. It's still coming out a bit sticky after adding the butter. Perhaps the trick will be to keep the rice on a low heat while adding the butter so that it creates a nice glaze instead of clumping. But slowly but surely, we're getting there!
Jamaican BBQ Chicken
When we were in the Montego Bay airport, we decided to pick up some seasonings to bring home with us. We asked the friendly store clerk which BBQ sauce she enjoyed the most and had the best spice. She immediately recommended Eaton's. We were so excited to cook with it when we got home. We coated chicken breast with it generously, and roasted for 40 minutes.
The chicken was super juicy, but we were surprised to discover that the
sauce was not spicy at all. Really nothing to write home about. We
felt duped. But hey - you can never go terribly wrong with BBQ sauce.
So we still enjoyed it. Just wasn't as reminiscent of our meals on the
beach as we'd hoped.
Nothing like a great vacation to inspire a normal cooking repertoire! Lots more spicy experimentation to come.
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