Jamaica

Daylight come and I wanna cook food.  Ya mon.  Not to jerk you around or anything like that but really every morning I wake up imagining recipes and food.  So when Jamaica showed up I was excited to cook.   I had no thyme so I got some thyme to jerk around with.    What I love about Jamaican cooking is the easy going no fuss take it easy attitude towards the food they have.  Flavourful and made with fun and love.    One of my favourite preparations is making a Jerk Sauce or marination as each time I adapt it a little here and there.  Sometimes a real win and sometimes you make some notes of what worked and did not.   However the fun is in the cooking.  But then there is the variation of how you make it,  do you smoke it with apple wood, pimento wood or leaves, use coconut charcoal,   or as I have done before soak some bay leaves and allspice and let if smoulder in the charcoal for smoke.

The Menu

Jerk Chicken

Jerk Chicken almost always looks like its been burnt or charred.   However the reality is that Jerk Chicken is almost always made with offset heat.  So the dark outside is really just the natural browning of the spices but not really the chicken being charred.   Similar to how onions turn brown when cooking here the green onions turn a darkish brown to black when it is caramelized with the brown sugar in the marinade.   When I make Jerk Chicken I always make excess marinade and then boil it down and add a sweet component to it.  This time around I used agave syrup.  I then use this to baste the chicken.  However it is important to note that this must be done right.  My basting sauce is divided into two bowls one for raw basting (when the chicken is not fully cooked).  The other for when the chicken is being finished.  Because I boiled down the marinade it is safe to use as a side sauce or a finishing sauce.   It is always wise to use good food safety procedures when working with chicken.


Oxtail Stew

Oxtail in my opinion is one of those crazy mad dishes.   There are so many versions and variation of this stew depending on region, family and how mom used to make it.   The price of oxtail is really ridiculous considering the cut of meat it is.   But oxtail follows the chicken wing story almost verbatim and is in higher demand for only one reason and that is tradition.   Many families were brought up with oxtail being the traditional Sunday fare.    I looked at several recipes online and decided on a combination of a few recipes, using the good points from each one.   I used butter beans to give the stew some body and really did a very hard sear on the oxtail.   The dish turned out very nice and my Goose loved it,  however I am not the worlds bigger fan of oxtail so to me as far as oxtail goes it was good.  

Jamaica Cake

Pecans, pineapple, banana, rum, cinnamon and nutmeg in a cake.  What more is there to say.  YA MON



Goose is cross I think.