Escoveitched Fish is eaten in Jamaica for breakfast, lunch, and supper. I saw it served at the Norman Manley Airport as I was waiting to board my morning flight home, but I had been admonished to wait for a better version on my next visit.

This simple recipe is a cook's delight because it is so amenable to modification both in preparation and in presentation. You can use different types of fish, vary the marinade ingredients, and dress it in any number of ways. 

It's strange, too, in that the fish is cooked and then marinated without refrigeration. That, of course, makes it an excellent choice for a picnic or for a lunch on the beach. I fully expect to prepare this again in the summertime.

"Jamaica's Coat of Arms", Rice and Peas, is a delicious, easy, and substantial dish. It's quick enough to make (if you use canned beans) that I plan to add it to the weeknight repertoire. It was the surprise hit of the night at John's Jamaican Birthday Dinner!

But Rice and Peas has no peas at all - not by the language of New England cooks. By peas, the Jamaican cook is referring to red or green beans such as kidney beans.

Rice and Peas makes a fine accompaniment to many simple fish dishes such as broiled haddock or steamed cod, where the coconut milk lends an island flare.  

This uniquely Jamaican dish uses ackee, a tree fruit that is not uncommon in the islands, but that is cultivated for food only in Jamaica.

The ackee fruit is rare and expensive in New England markets. I got two cans for $9.99 each at Compare Foods Supermarket in Worcester, but I had to ask for it at the customer service counter.

This hearty Jamaican classic has a thousand ingredients and it takes a long time to make, but it's bursting with flavor and well worth the effort!

Some of the ingredients are unusual in the typical New England kitchen. Be sure to read about Jamaican Ingredients before committing to this recipe. 

Note that this is not a dish for fussy eaters! If they don't balk at the unfamiliar ingredients, they'll surely shriek at the little bones or the unidentifiable bits of fatty meat from the pig tail. This was food for the slaves, not for the masters. But it is a wonderful mosaic of textures and flavors that will excite the palate of those not so easily intimidated by a bowl of soup!

I bought Enid Donaldson's at the Norman Manley Airport in Kingston, Jamaica as I was heading home from a brief weekend trip. I had sampled most of the classic Jamaican dishes (and a range of Jamaican rums) so I was eager to try my hand at them when I got home.

Donaldson's book is excellent in many ways, but it has a few flaws that I can address here. To start with the strengths of the book: It is well and engagingly written, and filled with very good photos. It has a good section on ingredients with descriptions, illustrations, and tips. The recipes cover all the bases, from appetizers to desserts and drinks.

The problems are few and most can be remedied with experience and a sharp eye: The photos don't always reflect the dish as the recipe would produce it, so pay attention to the text. In many cases, simple steps are missing, probably assumed; an experienced cook will recognize these and account for them successfully in most cases. The greatest difficulty that I had with preparing the recipes in this book was in finding the ingredients: Donaldson presents the Jamaican names for everything, but the same ingredients are usually sold in the USA in Hispanic markets by their Spanish names. I describe those in a separate post on Jamaican Ingredients.

This is simple to make and delightfully complex to taste. This old cocktail rewards experimentation; the different Artisanal Gins made in New England can change the nature of this drink in unexpected ways, and the two "official" variations described below double the possible permutations. 

It's not a strong drink; equal parts of gin and four other less potent ingredients, plus a dash of Orange Bitters is all it takes. That means you can experiment with a few different gins in one sitting while imbibing no more alcohol than a standard restaurant Martini.

There are two variations of this cocktail.  You can get Satan's Whiskers "curled", as written here, or you can get them "straight" by substituting orange curacao for the Grand Marnier. 

Here's my short list of must-make great Christmas sweets from many lands. Each entry links to a recipe.

Annette provided little in the way of guidance for her birthday feast. Getting back to her favorite basics, she wanted only "some good cheeses, and a Mont Blanc".

I fretted about that for a while, until I learned that Savoy, in the French Alps, is known for excellent cheeses and is also home to Mont Blanc (the geological marvel, not the delicate chestnut culinary masterpiece).

Like Vermont, Savoy is ski country and it produces great cheeses. Savoy is the home of fondue, that quintessential apres ski communal party food. It is also the home of Tomme, not to mention Comte, Raclette, Reblochon, and more. Neighboring Jura has more wonderful cheeses.  And Mont Blanc is the border between the Savoy department of France and the Val d'Aosta province in northwestern Italy, home of Fontina and Robiola.

A birthday dinner in Chamonix could easily enjoy some wonderful cheeses while gazing upon the snow-capped splendor of Mont Blanc. Obviously a mountain cheese theme was emerging, some sort of December apres-ski casual dinner that included the favorite local fondue, with the eponymous Mont Blanc (the culinary marvel) as the crowning glory.

Here's what we had:

We had another awesome potluck, this one with a Spanish theme. It was late summer, so we had all sorts of ingredients available, and we could use the grill outside.

We had a special guest for this lunch - a writer and a photographer from Inc. Magazine! They wrote about it in this article in the December-January 2014-15 issue.

We had:

On a gorgeous Friday evening in September, we went the few blocks down the street to the Harlow Old Fort House to participate in their first annual FlipFest.  

Flip is a colonial cool-weather drink. In this version, ale is fortified with molasses and rum, and then a red-hot poker is thrust into the mixture, causing it to foam up and get all sorts of really interesting caramelized molasses and malt flavors.

This can be a time-consuming process because you have to heat the poker. You can flip a mug or a pitcher of ale. Obviously the pitcher goes further, but each serving doesn't get as hot.

And heat is the charm and the problem here. Home gas grills do not get as hot as charcoal, and certainly not as hot as this blacksmith's forge with an apprentice tending the bellows. If you plan to make more than one pitcher or mug of flip, consider setting a few irons in the fire so you don't have to wait for them to heat up again. 

Such a wonderful and peculiar feast was this one!

Lorna had only two requests, but they are two of the trickiest and most time-consuming recipes that I make. The Lobster Cardinal is a decadent luxury from the Escoffier Cookbook that requires a flurry of last-minute preparation. The Orange Hazelnut Buttercream Torte is a brilliant cake from Please to the Table that requires numerous steps performed over several hours, with waiting time in between.

No obvious theme for the menu was suggested by the two requests. The lobster dish is a pre-WWI era fancy dish with black truffles, a creamy sauce, and many steps. The cake is a Russian fancy cake. For a wine, I considered a Viognier but opted instead for the classic Veuve Clicquot as the better accompaniment to the classic recipe.

Actually, one theme emerged loud and clear. This would be an expensive dinner. The truffle alone cost $40. I used 6 lobsters in all: four selects for serving, plus two more quarters for the meat. In addition to the Champagne, I brought up a 2001 Ruffino Chianti Classico Riserva Ducale Oro. This was a big birthday, so I didn't mind the expense, but it didn't help to develop a theme.

This was invented for an election celebration in Boston's Eighth Ward (Southie & Roxbury) over a hundred years ago. It's a little sweet and you can overdo it with the fruit salad (like this one), so use some restrain here.

The charm of the Ward 8 seems to be in the way the orange and the lemon compete for the favor of the sweet grenadine, with a dry rye whiskey pulling the strings like a wily old South Boston politician. You could put down a few of these before you realize there's really liquor in there! 

It was a dark and stormy night...

I went to Jamaica for a weekend to attend the wedding of an old friend's daughter. I had never been to Jamaica (or anywhere in the Caribbean) and I had not seen Fitzroy in 21 years so I was ready for an adventure of the unknown!

That's a good thing because there was a tropical depression in the neighborhood that built into a hurricane while I was there; fortunately for the bride and the rest of us it passed to the north leaving Jamaica with only much-needed rain. 

When I arrived at the Norman Manley International Airport in Kingston, Fitz picked me up and within minutes we were talking like we'd seen each other yesterday. As we made our way around the big harbor from the airport to the city, we got right back to the old business of solving the problems of the world.  

This is a change of pace from the sweet, juicy, tall coolers that I saw in Jamaican hotels. It it built on the classic cocktail model of 3:1 plus lime juice. A moment of relaxed contemplation reveals layers of tropical flavors against an authoritative rum backbone. I hope to try it at home with some Falernum syrup, but the Stone's is ubiquitous in its Jamaican home.  

It is named for my friend Hugo "Racei" Matthews of Kingston, Jamaica. I invented it while awaiting his wedding, during a savage downpour that cleared up just in time for the happy occasion. This one was mixed at the Knutsford Court hotel, where I stayed and which I recommend.

This is properly made with Appleton Genesis white Jamaica rum, because I made it with that fine product, I was in Jamaica at the time, and as far as I know Racei is still there and happily married.

This festive dessert is spectacular, time-consuming, and short lived. It is best made for a celebration.

It is simply a shell made of meringue filled with whipped cream and fresh berries; the trick lies in making a good shell.

This traditional American summer classic is best made with very fresh peaches when they are in season in August and early September. 

Be sure to buy them where they are grown! As with most fruit, the riper a peach gets, the softer it gets, so tree-ripe fruit is hard to pack and ship. Peaches shipped from Georgia or elsewhere are typically picked somewhat underripe, and then gassed with ethylene in a warehouse to "ripen" them artificially. 

This handsome drink is complex and flavorful, suitable for hot nights or cold ones. 

Lucien Gaudin was a world-champion fencer in the early 20th Century, winning awards from 1905 to 1928, including four gold medals and two silver medals in the 1924 and 1928 Olympic games. In the 1920s and 1930s, new cocktails were invented for all sorts of pop-culture references. Most have long since failed the test of time, but this tasty gin-and-Campari concoction remains a winner!

This heavy pastry is middle-eastern. I have been told it is Armenian, Greek, Lebanese, and Turkish. Whoever invented it deserves a prize!

This is sweet, but not super-sweet. It's great with tea or coffee after a light middle-eastern dinner in the summer.  

The original fall classic!

I like this best early in the season with Yellow Transparents, and late in the season with Northern Spy, Golden Russet, and Baldwin apples.  

We did it again. The weather forecast was promising, so the VP Engineering surprised us with a shiny new gas grill!

The Software Developers and the QA crew had at it, with a little help from the Technical Writers, Marketing, and two industrious interns. Our CSA share came in that morning, so we had a lot of "raw material" to work with.

This was our biggest pot-luck lunch so far, maybe thanks to the creative energy unleashed by that grill. Some of it was competitive energy, and some was just the joy of sharing something delicious with our friends.

We had:

I had some egg yolks on hand, so I made this Mayonnaise up to accompany a lot of summer dishes, mostly chicken salad, grilled chicken and white fish, and fresh farmers' market vegetables. It's really good!

This is easy to prepare in an electric mixer. This recipe makes quite a lot!

Sous-vide cooking is a technique, not a recipe. The principle is to cook a piece of meat slowly at a carefully controlled temperature no higher than the final cooking temperature of the interior of the meat. This results in supremely tender meat.

The steak cooked in the homemade cooker below reached an internal temperature of 131 degrees Fahrenheit after an hour and 53 minutes in the cooker.