Poulet au Lait de Coco
West Indian Rice and Beans
I've had a craving for tropical food recently. Actually I always have a craving for tropical food; this climate seems to inform it, as does my general affinity for all things island. If it comes with palm fronds, steel drums and cocktails with plastic monkeys, I'm all over it like a rash.
My experimentation with Caribbean cooking has been hit-or-miss (hit -- last year's Easter dinner; miss -- Run Down,
which has an excellent name but languished uneaten in the refrigerator
until I had to throw it away with a heavy heart, thinking of the
starving babies in Haiti.)
This dinner was both a resounding hit and a near-miss. It was a hit because both of these recipes are absolutely delicious, a miss because they don't go together at all. There's a lot of ingredient redundancy -- all those green onions, all that thyme -- and also textural redundancy; I had no idea that genuine Caribbean beans and rice are basically a soup, or a really loose risotto, not at all what you want with a curry. When you make these things, which you should, have the curry with plain white rice and a dish of beans on the side, and the beans and rice with some jerk chicken or even just a nice pork chop.
ANYWAY, I really wanted to post this because of this site,
which I StumbledUpon and have become obsessed with. It is not for the novice cook; the recipes are terse and the techniques are
sketchy. It's basically a shorthand archive of a great many recipes
from a great many precious, out-of-print cookbooks that I can't afford,
and I love it for that. Actually I would love it just for the recipe
for Poulet au Lait de Coco, which hails from Martinique (palm fronds!
plastic monkeys!), and is the kind of recipe, beloved by me, that is
ridiculously easy to put together and still makes people want to have
the cook's babies. I tinkered with it a little bit; I threw the onions
and garlic in the blender to make a paste per my usual curry method,
and stir-fried the paste with the thyme and curry powder. Don't waste
your precious saffron here; it will be totally lost. I also did not
have poulet, so I subbed shrimp, and when the liquid looked like it was
overwhelming the protein I threw in a large chopped mango. This took
about fifteen minutes and was extremely tasty and unusual.
The beans and rice were an exercise in Weird, for me. I grew up with the edict that you do not stir rice ever, ever, ever, so executing the recipe was a lesson in adaptability and trust. Also, have you ever noticed that the flavor elements in Caribbean cooking are really peculiar? Thyme and allspice in rice? Both scallions and parsley in the curry? What? But all doubts are banished when the aroma starts to rise; this is true fusion cuisine, and it smells like God. I added some minced fresh ginger to the rice, and sauteed onions instead of scallions, and it turned out just fine. Runny, but fine.
Now all I need is a mojito. Or at least a Red Stripe.
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