Neopolitan focaccia with pepperoni.

Minnesota Hot Dish with a Caribbean twist

How does one conjure up such a delectable and exotic fusion concoction? It takes some experience in life to think this one up so you need to get about three tablespoons of butter and heat it in a large cast iron skillet and add two tablespoons of any curry powder that you can find. Let the curry sauté in the butter until it has turned from bright yellow to a golden brown color and at this time add one and a half pounds of your choice of ground meat. I prefer fresh ground pork, or ground steak, and or canned beans such as garbanzos or red beans. You can substitute meat for other protein items like some fine vegan textured protein if you wish such and so on and so forth. When you get to this point, you mash in about four soft boiled unpeeled potatoes with a potato masher and four to five cloves of crushed garlic. Cook further this mixture and add salt and pepper to taste. Introduce one quarter of a cup of chopped green onions and two teaspoons of fresh toasted cumin seeds. I suspect that at this point you can then add one cup of heavy cream and spoon the mixture into a casserole dish and sprinkle the top with bread crumbs. Bake to your desired state of doneness, and make sure the bread crumbs on the top get extra toasty. Some people like their hot dish a little firm and cooked to the point that it can be sliced with a knife into neat little squares. Others like a moister and runny consistency to the hot dish recipe, with that extra sprinkle of the toasty bread crumbs for those cold and gloomy Duluth days that seem to be my most creative moments for cooking. So did you guys and gals enjoy all the warm tropical like weather we had recently? I almost gave myself heatstroke by sitting out on the deck too long, while I was grilling up my next recipe. One pineapple should be topped and the thick skin be shaved off with a sharp longer knife. Just cut up to about a half inch under the skin. Cut neat slices off the both ends of the pineapple to allow it to sit on the cutting board nicely, and shave away. Make the remains of your fruit into slices and remove the inedible center. On your hot outdoor grill the pineapple along with two whole habanero peppers, garlic cloves, baby shallots, and a slice of red onion. After the pineapple displays beautiful grill marks remove from the grill and cut into bite sized chunks after which, cool it down in the fridge. Grill the other ingredients until really brown and mince them to a paste with a few sprigs of fresh cilantro and a couple stems of green onions. These ingredients are then to be mixed up with the grilled pineapple chunks and if you can resist, let it sit and marinate itself about another half hour in the refrigerator. This is my style of preparing a Grilled Pineapple Chow, and you should give it a try. This pineapple dish can also be served adult style by adding about half bottle of any type of over proof white rum to the bowl and one and one half cups of white sugar. Garnish with sliced strawberries and mandarin chunks. Cover the grilled pineapple rum chow with plastic wrap and let it sit for a couple hours before serving. A fun way to serve this at a party is to present it with long bamboo skewers that allow the unsuspecting taster to skew a few pieces of the over proof and habanero laced Grilled Pineapple Chow, only to realize that they may have gotten into something more, than the usual party snack. After all of the pineapple is gone, don't toss the juice. Save it, to mix into your barbecue sauce and or may also be used as a marinade for spicy chicken, beef, pork when you get late night spicy food cravings. Marinate your meat and then grill or skillet fry, until ready to eat. More to come!

Green Banana Souse

For this recipe, we will make a vegetarian version of a pickled pork dish that is common throughout the southern Caribbean Islands. You will first need about two pounds of green bananas and this you can find at most any local supermarket. Place the bananas in a large pot of boiling water for about twenty five minutes and then remove them and allow to cool to room temperature. Peel the skins off and cut them crosswise into about half inch slices and place into a bowl. Add enough water to just cover the bananas in the bowl and add three tablespoons of lime juice, two cloves of crushed garlic, and one half cup of thinly sliced white onions. Then you can season this with one teaspoon of salt, on half teaspoon of chopped hot habanero pepper, and some fresh ground white pepper. Go further and add one cup of thinly sliced cucumbers and one half cup of fresh chopped water cress. Chill the souse for a few hours before serving. Normally, one would find this souse dish including meats like thinly sliced pieces of pork, fresh crab meat, fish, scallops or mussels. I have found the banana version to be just as tasty and delicious. Another treat I remember from the mid-summer memories of the past is stuffed okras. A simple recipe to make, from the little odds and ends from your home garden, this recipe will surely make your guests wonder what you have been reading this past week. Blend together or hand blend in a mortar and pestle one tablespoon finely chopped onions or green onions, which ever you prefer better. Also add to the blend two cloves of garlic, one half teaspoon of curry powder, one cup of finely chopped peeled and deveined shrimp, one half teaspoon of salt, a quarter teaspoon of hot pepper, and one tablespoon of parsley. Now you will also need about eighteen fresh and firm looking okras from the local supermarket or farmers market. Cut the top and the end of the okras and make a slit down the center with a paring knife. Put a little of the blended shrimp mixture inside each okra and after all are stuffed you can start to cook them. Heat a tablespoon of vegetable oil in a nonstick frying pan and place the okras together so that they are tightly packed. Sprinkle with a little salt, cover and cook for about fifteen minutes or until the okras are cooked but still firm. These make great appetizers for your summer parties and I suspect that some of the more ambitious readers will experiment this week and try cooking this recipe out on a grill, or under an oven broiler. Whichever way you try and succeed, you will find that trying new foods and cooking them not in accordance with the recipe, can result in failure, or some burnt dinner snacks. The banana raisin drink is one I would like to share, and it is more popular in the Eastern Caribbean islands like Grenada, St. Vincent and Barbados, you will need about one third of a cup of any kind of raisins. Also one and one half cups of water, eight ice cubes, two ripe peeled bananas, one teaspoon of vanilla extract, one and a quarter cups of evaporated milk, one quarter cup of rum, three quarters of a cup of granulated sugar to sweeten to taste and one teaspoon of grated or ground nutmeg. Combine the raisins, water and the ice cubes and put into a blender and process until the raisins and the ice cubes are crushed. Then add the bananas, the vanilla extract, the evaporated milk and the rum. Blend it for a few seconds until pureed and add a little more rum, when no one is looking now. Remove from the blender and sweeten with some sugar or condensed milk and place in the refrigerator until chilled. Serve in glasses sprinkled with nutmeg on the top. For garnish, you can skewer maraschino cherries, with banana slices and mango cubes onto a toothpick which is floated on the top of the glass and then doused with a next shot of rum.

Caribbean Men’s Aphrodisiac

Little fish are making a little bit of a comeback this year let us hope that it is going to happen every year. I was also thinking about the Homegrown Music Festival this week also and was reckoning the likeness of the smelt run this year, as an omen of things to come. Well you see this week one of the famous local bands went on national TV and closed up the talk show. As a result, it is again putting Duluth, Minnesota on the international music scene, since the said performance on the talk show could also be viewed in many locations around the planet. With due respect, I found it fitting to share a recipe this week, that is as rare and esteemed as this bountiful year for local music and the recent smelt run. I must also shout out my friend Jim for inviting me to the Magic Smelt event, what a great and wonderful gift of your talent and experience you have shared the city of Duluth. This recipe for deep fried smelt comes the southern parts of the Caribbean as served in a type of establishment known as a Rum Shop; the primary drink served is rum of course, straight up and with a complimentary glass of ice cold water as a chaser. If ever you came to such a bar and ordered a mixed drink such as a rum and coke, you would be frowned upon by the fellow patrons who drank their rum straight up with a chase of water, which for some reason it irritated them and, sometimes this story, would not always have a happy ending. Since we can and cannot rule out the consumption of liquor, for this sort of behavior, I concluded that is must be the type of food that is served to the patrons in these Rum Shops that accounted for the somewhat hot blooded and distempered fellows. Now this recipe uses freshly netted smelt from Lake Superior that has been neatly cut open with a kitchen scissor and the entrails removed with a quick flick of the fingernails. Allow about three pounds of eviscerated and washed smelt to sit in a bit of water with a few drops of lemon juice. Drain, and then add some minced cilantro, salt, pepper, sprinkle of allspice, and half of a habanero pepper that is finely chopped. A few more cloves of crushed garlic to the smelt marinade will complete it, and then you let it sit for at least an hour in the fridge. At this point place a couple cups of white flour on a baking sheet and sprinkle salt, pepper and ground cumin on top of the flour. Roll and dust all the smelt liberally in the flour letting them sit in the flour about ten minutes. An evident thick coat of flour should be somewhat sticky to the touch. Here is where you take all the dusted smelt to very hot fry oil in a skillet about one inch deep. You can also use a traditional deep fryer if you choose to do so. I let the fish fry until very crispy and well done as it is traditionally served, with the heads and tails intact. I eat the whole entire smelt. The fish head goes in one bite and I savor this morsel with intense delight. The bones of the smelt are softer than butter when prepared in this way and you won’t even notice that they are even there. I make a special dipping sauce for the fried dried fish, with a cup of ketchup, four tablespoons of soy sauce, four tablespoons of Tabasco sauce, one chopped habanero pepper and a squeeze of fresh lime juice. Rumor has it that the fried fish heads, when eaten as a daily ration, will give one the stamina and vigor to consume even more rum and increases tolerance to the ill effects of over consumption the next day. The combination of rum and fried fish has also been traditionally exploited by millions of Caribbean women as an ensnaring food aphrodisiac for Caribbean men. You learn something new every day. Enjoy and support the Homegrown!

Caribbean Rum Ceviche

In the West Indies which is otherwise known as the Caribbean Region, there’s always the sport of cricket. When these minute island nations put together teams of players that can win sport matches against mighty countries such as England, Australia or India, there is always reason for celebrations. At the cricket matches one can hear loud long notes similar to the sound made from a trumpet, but from a conch shell. Conch, pronounced ‘conk’ refers to the queen conch species of aquatic shelled animal found only in the warm waters of the Caribbean, especially so around the coral islands such as Tobago, Barbados, Grenada, The Grenadines and the Tobago Cays and more popular with others, Jamaica and the Bahamas. A creature as old in earth time as the queen conch, some sixty five millions years, carries with it a certain mystique, at once exotic and beautiful. Caribbean inventiveness has created innumerable dishes with conch meat, all of which require several dashes of hot scotch bonnet pepper sauce, and only to be served up with rum and more rum and then some after, rum cocktails. So lets gets this party jamming as I let you have my secret ceviche recipe. We will need one kilogram of conch meat. Ok, with the rising cost of living these days this is something that is easier said than done, or in my destitute case, it would be easier to substitute with crab meat or your favorite choice of seafood as this dish is diverse in its very nature. Squeeze the juice of three limes, measure out two tablespoons of olive oil, salt to taste, about five tablespoons of rum, and then four more shots of the rum secretly into a tea cup nearby which you can consume on the neat, in private. Then you can act up like you got a little ‘o’ bit of the Captain in you. Carrying on with the ingredients list now, we will also need three yellow onions sliced thinly and one large red ripe tomato thinly sliced. Chop four tablespoons of fresh cilantro and again, chop finely one habanero pepper with the seeds removed. Cube the seafood meat and pound it to tenderize it if needed. In the case of fresh conch meat, the pounding process is always necessary. However if you were to use a more delicate meat from a crab, lobster or shrimp, the tenderizing process is somewhat unnecessary. After messing up your kitchen with this step, grab a skillet and poach the meat in a little water, just enough to cover the meat, for not more than five minutes. Drain and reserve the liquid and then mix all the other ingredients in a deep bowl. Add the seafood to the bowl and then add four or five tablespoons of the reserve liquid. Toss to coat and let it sit in the refrigerator for two hours and then garnish with hot peppers when serving. This recipe is a sure way to keep warm and be the hit of the pot luck party this fall.Now picture the European planter, home after a day on horseback overseeing his slaves in the hot sugar cane fields of the Caribbean. His first order of his house slaves is to serve him up a rum punch. It is served, as he lounges back on a plush plantation chair at his verandah, a shield from the blazing tropical sun. We must give credit to the slave as the creator of the first Planter’s Punch and as a result there are many variations to this recipe as there were sugarcane growing islands in the Caribbean. This recipe is from Trinidad. Shake two ounces of aged Trinidad rum, one ounce lime juice, half ounce sugar syrup and two dashes of Angostura bitters, with some shaved ice in a shaker. Pour it into a tall glass and top it up with red soda, any kind or brand of soda will do, so long as it is you preference to include it into the recipe. I prefer to use straight up root beer or cream soda if it is available. Garnish your drink with fruits and keep at it till later!

Caribbean Style Grilled Pineapple Barbecue

The last couple of weeks I got extra creative and now I got some recipes to share with you. I will start you off with my first order which is the honey curried vegetable, shrimp and chicken pita wrap. You can make your own pita breads like I do in my wood fired oven, but you can use the store bought ones also, that will do just fine is you can toast them up. Get some chopped bell peppers, carrots, fennel bulb, mushrooms, summer squash, shallots and red onions all julienned up and ready for your grill. Then marinate them with olive oil and chopped cilantro, cumin powder, black pepper and red pepper flakes. Get some prepped shrimp thawed and declawed or some crab meat along with fresh chicken breasts. Ready the shrimp and chicken for your hot grill by marinating them in a dry rub made of coriander, cumin, black mustard, fennel, fenugreek, black pepper, garlic powder, onion powder and salt. Mix some honey and a cup of water to your desired level of sweetness and add a couple spoons of curry powder and sauté the mixture in hot butter until it is reduced by half. Now for the fun part, grill the vegetables, chicken and shrimp till they are done and then rub melted butter on the pita breads and grill them till they are nice and crisp. Start to then drizzle some honey on the pita breads and then spoon vegetables, chicken and shrimp onto the whole mess. Add the honey curry sauce on the top of everything and serve while it is still hot. Wasn’t that fun? My friends that had this dish last week though it was pretty neat, and were left rather satisfied. The next treat is to peel and slice a pineapple. If you have been following my articles in the previous editions of the transistor, you would see that we have already gone over how to get a pineapple from the store to your grill with little effort. If you missed that issue, I think they are still available online somewhere, but anyway back to the grilled pineapple chunks that you just skillfully made from your very own grill. Chop about a cup of them and sauté with a little butter and then add a couple tablespoons of brown sugar to the mix. Let the sugar melt away and the chopped grilled pineapple simmer some time on low heat till the mixture thickens. Mix up your favorite guacamole recipe and let it chill and then add in the pineapple and stir well. My guacamole recipe is simple avocado, olive oil, habanero peppers, lime juice, garlic, onion, salt and maybe tomatoes only if they are sweet and juicy enough. Remember that guacamole is best served when fresh and you can always preserve your extra guacamole by freezing it in sandwich bags and pressing the air out of the bags. After putting out a fresh bowl of guacamole on the summer picnic table, it always tends to brown quickly. I will share a little trick I use to prevent a discolored crust from forming on my guacamole. I use a canned spray of olive oil and give the bowl of guacamole a spray after it is put out. The olive oil spray will form a light and protective barrier or layer on the surface of the food known as your guacamole, so that the oxygen in the atmosphere will not oxidize the constituents of the avocado fruit, through the biochemical processes known as the oxidation. So this Memorial Day, when you are firing up the grill, I think that you should also give my barbecue sauce recipe a try. You will need to chop up the rest of the grilled pineapple and simmer it in a bottle of your favorite barbecue sauce, then add a cup of rum from the Caribbean and a beer of your choice. Then add a cup of brown sugar and boil it some more. Throw in about four strips of bacon and a cup of fresh cilantro and six cloves fresh crushed garlic. Simmer for half of an hour then enjoy on your barbecue.