Happy Trails

Hello everyone!  I am back in Olympia finishing up my independent project this quarter.  It is strange to be back from Trinidad, but I am excited to be back in school and working for the admissions office.  This is the prime season for admissions!  We are having so many wonderful conversations with students and parents who are interested in Evergreen.  Many questions often revolve around what materials need to be submitted with a student’s application and one of them, of course, is an SAT or ACT score.  Recently a friend of mine forwarded this little link to me and I thought that all of you at the tail end of your college search, interested/involved in education, or familiar with a standardized test(who isn’t? If you aren’t, lucky you!) might appreciate this:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/04/17/eighth-grader-designs-standardized-test-that-slams-standardized-tests/

Moving in a different direction from personal situations of accessible food, I recently spoke with a woman by the name of Paula who, after making her fair share of Evergreen jokes, told me something very interesting.  Not long ago, there was a large quantity of land set aside for the cultivation of crops and other agricultural products that grew well in Trinidad.  The land was prepared, seeds were sown, and crops were going to be harvested.  However, for a reason that was not revealed to me despite my probing, the land was seemingly bought by a private company and bulldozed, crops and all.  There was, most recently, a plan to building residential housing on this land, but nothing has come of this as of 2013.

As much as I would like to explore this more, I cannot find anything of significance on the matter.  Nobody has mentioned this to me before, and I am sad they have not.  This is a story that I would have liked to pursue.  Granted, it may not be big news, or well known, but either way I find it unfortunate that I could not pursue this further.  In the next few days, I will attempt to pursue this as much as possible.

If this story is true, even at a basic level, the implications of this are large.  On the outside there seems to be  a desire, from the political sphere,  to become independent or at least less dependent on foreign food supplies.  This act, however, would have been a step in the exact opposite direction of this.  Since Paula did not give me specific dates on this event, my searches are slightly difficult.  Hopefully I will have more luck speaking to people that I meet.

Earlier this week, one of my good friends asked me to meet her during her lunch break: at a Wendys.  I decided to forgo eating at this little lunch date due not only to the fact that I could not handle the irony of me including a large portion of the negative aspects of fast food in Trinidadian society in my project and then eating at a Wendy’s, but also because I do not even consume their products in general, or those of any mega fast food franchise, for a variety of reasons.  Regardless, entering the Wendy’s around one in the afternoon I found it absolutely packed by people in suits and well-groomed bodies.

Tagging along with my friend for her lunch break was her co-worker, Taresa, who was about ten years her senior.  When Taresa is not working, she is focusing on her graduate work at the St. Augustine campus of the University of the West Indies.  Her main subjects are economics and sociology.  After running through many of the routine starter questions that generally go into many starts of my conversations here, which I’m sure many of you are familiar with (where are you from, what are you studying, what is your project about, etc.), we unexpectedly began discussing how she sees the evolution of food in Trinidad since she was a child, and where she sees it going.

Looking back to when she was a child, Taresa remembers climbing trees, a memory that many would share not just in Trinidad, but I would assume across many continents; I know I have many memories of climbing trees in the summer.  But what sets her memories apart from mine is that she remembers climbing up into trees and eating copious amounts of fruit.  “In my yard we had a mango tree, but if I climbed onto my roof, I could get over to my neighbors’ yards’ trees, with a cherry tree on one side, and plums on the other.  When I played with other kids, we would gorge ourselves on these cherries and plums.  I remember eating so many that I would sometimes get very, very sick and couldn’t eat dinner.”  My friend chipped in, mentioning how whenever she was thirsty as a kid, she would climb the coconut tree in her yard.  If she could fight past the bugs and other challenges along the way, she would be able to enjoy fresh coconut.  Last week, when I wrote about Chandra, I remember Klaus asking if I wanted some coconut water.  Ten minutes later, he returned: he had just climbed the tree in his backyard to get some.

Continuing, Taresa mentioned: “when I was really young, we were not allowed to eat the best mangoes in the tree.  Those were reserved for the elders in our household, or used as gifts to others.”  According to Taresa, if they wanted something to eat outside of a meal time, they had to find their own way of feeding themselves.  “Chow” was a popular snack that they were able to make for themselves.  If someone were to see chow on a menu in a restaurant, it would be very different than what Taresa and her friends would make.  “We had to use whatever we could steal from the kitchen.  Essentially, that was just vinegar, salt, and pepper.”  They would take the green mangoes from the tree and peel them as best as possible and slice them up very thinly.  Then, they would mix the salt, pepper, and vinegar with these slices.  Mixing everything in a sealable container, they would dig a hole in the ground, bury everything and let it ferment.  After a few days, the kids had a healthy snack that they made themselves.

Yet, today she feels as though young people are living in an entirely different world.  “We live in the age of snacks.  Kids are usually indoors rather than outside, and when they are inside they are getting instantaneous snacks.  Its nuked.  Its packaged.  Its unhealthy, and they aren’t learning how to feed themselves.”  Taresa believes there has also been an increase in fast food consumption over the past few decades, but those figures are not made transparent to the public.  I have been unable to locate a suitable record of even an estimate of what those numbers might be.  Though these numbers are not available, what is clear is that the single business that owns all of the KFCs and Pizza Huts in the Caribbean has steadily had 10-12 percent profits over the past several years.

Despite these accounts being of only one particular individual’s experience, I have found that much like Andre from my post a few weeks back, Taresa also felt a strong sense of food being available for consumption without a significant financial investment.

Over the course of my stay here, I’ve mostly been doing interviews, reading articles, and some archival research.  However, earlier this week I had the opportunity to help a woman, Chandra, make roti in her home.  A native of Trinidad, she is married to a German businessman by the name of Klaus, and they live just outside of Port-of-Spain with their two children.  Since it was the week before Easter, many of their family members were there visiting from the United States.  She prepared a delicious feast, feeding over fifteen people out of her kitchen.  Though Chandra made the process seem simple, there was an immense amount of nuance that went into each part of the meal she prepared.

As some of my previous posts have hinted towards, roti is a diverse vessel for food, sometimes just served as flatbread that is used to “grab” the food when eating with your hands(sada roti, like we were making, is soft: to eat with it, pinch the bread and then pick up whatever delicious thing on your plate it is you want to eat), while in other cases used as a wrap (dhalpouri) to transfer a variety of different proteins and sauces to your mouth.  In this case, Chandra was making sada roti, and is a common breakfast food in Trinidad.  Many people I have interviewed have said this is the most commonly consumed form of roti on the island; it can be served with almost anything, though there are certain companion foods that go particularly well with roti, which Chandra shared with me and I will detail in this post.

In terms of ingredients and skill, this is the easiest form of roti to make, and consists of white flour, baking powder, salt, and vegetable oil.  Mix these ingredients into dough, and cover with a damp cloth for about half an hour; then, divide the dough into even-sized balls and cover for another 30 minutes or so.  After that, roll out the individual pieces of dough with a width of about half and inch.  Heat these over medium to high heat, and if possible, over an open flame.  The bread will slightly bubble up, as it should, and will brown on the outside, but just slightly.  Too much heat will make the bread crispy, and will make picking up the food with the bread a bit more difficult and more importantly, not absorb as much flavor.  When the bread is finished, it is important to wrap the bread in a towel to keep the heat in so it does not get stale before it is time to eat.

Though this bread is simple and delicious enough to eat just by itself, what makes sada roti a particularly interesting dish is its diverse utility at any time of day, for any meal.  Since Chandra was preparing dinner, meats were involved, as according to Chandra, “Indians would never eat meat for breakfast, though the tomato choka is perfect for early morning snacks”(I will detail tomato choka later).  There was a pork dish, but I did not eat any, instead I focused on having a serious love affair with the curried shrimp, a dish which consisted of fresh shrimp, allspice, coconut milk, vegetable oil, onions, garlic, curry powder, ginger, garam masala spices(cinnamon, cloves, cumin, cardamom, and sometimes white pepper depending on the person), salt, and pepper.  A standard curry dish by any definition, this combination of small amounts of natural sweetness and complex savory flavor create a balanced dish both in terms of taste and nutrition.

In addition to the curried shrimp, Chandra also made a tomato choka.  Choka simply refers to the the method of preparation, and can applied to almost any vegetable or dry cured fish.  Initially Chandra was making an eggplant choka, but in the midst of taking care of her one year old son, understandably, had other things to deal with and made one too many errors in the preparation.  As a substitute, she prepared the tomatoes by chopping them very fine, adding them to a skillet of vegetable oil on medium heat, and adding salt, pepper, garlic and cilantro.  This, combined with the curried shrimp, roti, and fried plantains was a wonderful production of a common Caribbean dinner.

Waiting for my favorite doubles stand to open…

Karl Anderson, Woodbrook, Port-of-Spain

A litter-filled Woodbrook Waterway

Click the picture for full-size.

Throughout this week, our activity has been fairly slow.  Despite the reduced pace, I’ve still managed to focus on some different aspects of Trinidadian culinary productions and I’d like to share some of them in the sampling.  First, I’ll be talking about one of the most popular beach foods, “bake and shark”, followed up with a description of what I would consider to be the most applied condiment, “pepper sauce”, and why these two are significant.

Regardless of which sunny seaside shore you decide to venture to on your day off, no beach visit is complete without a meal of bake and shark.  Hopefully, your palate enjoys fried food.  Pretty much everything about this meal is fried, so make sure to hit the gym afterwards. The hardest part of this recipe is getting the “bake”, a type of bread, just right; conceptually it is incredibly easy, but the frying itself is an entirely different story.  First, the bake’s dough must be made, which consists of flour, salt, yeast, baking powder, shortening, butter, and vegetable oil.  Mix it, and let it rest for about 30 minutes to an hour; then, shape the dough into equal sized balls, about the size of tennis balls.  Press them flat, with about 6 inches of diameter.  After the dough is made and molded into the particular “bake shape”, the frying commences: the trick is to not over fry the dough.  Once the oil is heated, pop in the dough, and as soon as it hits the oil, flip it.  It should take no more than 3 minutes to fry each piece of bake.  Once they’ve been fried, make sure to pat them dry to get any extra oil off.

After the bake has been fried, you’ll need to prepare the shark: remove all skin and bone, then slice as thinly as possible.  Shark meat is known to hold quite a bit of extra water, so once you’ve given it some extra squeezes to get out the extra liquid, rub it down with the the juice of a lime.  Mix the shark meat, some salt, pepper, crushed garlic, finely chopped scotch bonnets, and “green seasoning” (a lovely unique Caribbean paste consisting of shado beni, Spanish thyme, celery, pimentos, and other goodies).  Again, this is fried: flour the marinated shark mixture before adding it to the oil.  Frying time for these is about 2-3 minutes.  Dry them from the oil; proceed to slice the bake open and stuff pieces of shark into the bread.  Top these with tomatoes, lettuce, coleslaw, and red onions.  Sometimes, pineapples and cucumbers are added as well.  Tamarind and garlic sauces are popular toppings, in addition to “pepper sauce”, which I will discuss in another post.

Although what is listed above do not seem particularly special or out of this world, though the final product might, what sets bake and shark apart from other “street/beach” foods is the origins of the ingredients involved in the production of the food.  All of these ingredients, except for garlic, can come directly from Trinidad and Tobago and does not necessarily rely on imports.  The domestic fishing industry can provide the shark meat, with the agricultural industry producing the rest.  Though some of these ingredients are not necessarily what Trinidad is known for in terms of exports, they are all grown in the agricultural sector within the island itself.  These are important cultural productions not only because “everyone eats this at the beach”, but because everything can be gathered without leaving the country.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about “doubles”, a common street food here in Trinidad that I eat quite often.  There are several types of quickly prepared food(not fast food) that are popular here in Trinidad; if you somehow have eaten your fill on doubles for the week, a good Roti shop is a good substitute for any doubles stand.  I mentioned in that post that Roti is a significant dish here, and this week I’ll talk a little bit about it.

Roti is a type of flat bread and can be found in many cultural productions. In Trinidad, however, the bread itself is called a “roti skin” and is regularly served with channa and aloo and curried chicken, beef, pork, duck, or shrimp. Sometimes other vegetables are added in order for different shops to distinguish themselves from others. These “filler” ingredients can be served on the side or served wrapped up in the roti itself. Roti shops are by far the most common form of established food distributors with actual physical spaces that can be entered and I discover new ones often.  One of my favorites is called “Dopson’s” and is located between the neighborhoods of St.Clair and Woodbrook, near a bustling intersection on Tragarete Road.  Even though the immense amount of concrete here in Port-of-Spain makes everything incredibly hot and sweaty all the time, walking in to Dopson’s and ordering a simple Roti Dhalpouri wrap of channa and aloo spiced perfectly with curries, pimientos, and a collection of savory herbs is pure bliss.

Also, I’ve found this wonderful French bakery in the neighborhood fo St. Clair.  ”What is a French bakery doing in Trinidad?” some friends have asked me.  Well, in addition to being colonized by the Spanish and English, France also held the island for quite some time, and as a result, there are several (I know of at least 4 in the 6 block radius I am staying in) here in Port-of-Spain.  When I went to my favorite one, Peche Patisserie, the other day I ordered a beautiful crab-quinoa salad  mixed with fresh herbs and topped with pomegranate seeds and passion fruit dressing, with freshly baked focaccia on the side. Yum!  I’ve added a picture to the blog so you can drool over it.  Cheers.

Greetings!  Today, my travel partner and I visited the House of Jaipur Indian Tea Room in Port-of-Spain.  Hidden away on a street that primarily consists of residential homes, the Tea House can be a little hard to find to the average passerby.  Over nine years old, House of Jaipur has been serving authentic Indian cuisine to locals and tourists alike. However, with some help from some local residents, we were able to find our way into this fantastic little restaurant. Consisting of only three private rooms, House of Jaipur requires reservations to ensure that its patrons don’t get turned away consistently, and last Saturday we made reservations for lunch today.

Once seated inside a small, yet comfortable room my friend and I ordered cooling blended lime sodas made fresh in-house.  After browsing the menu and making some incredibly hard choices, we decided on Fried Coconut Masala Prawns(see picture), Vegetable Samosas, Sabzi Masala Cutlets, and my friend decided to also order chickenkofta for herself.  With our meals, we also were paired with particular teas, and for me, I had a Masala Chai while my companion had 2nd flush Darjeeling Tea.  With our meals, we were also served three delectable chutneys: mango, garlic, and tamarind.  

This is just a taste of some of the food I’ve been eating and focusing on while I’m in Trinidad.  East Indian culture is a huge part of the cultural background in many of the dishes that they have here, as you may have gathered from some of my other posts. If you have any questions particularly about Trinidad, please feel free to email me!  Cheers.