Monday, March 24, 2008

A slight delay (for CSA)

I had hoped to jump right back into my cooking groove this week, but it looks like I'm going to be working evenings the next couple of days and then going to the Coral Gables Wine and Food Fest on Thursday. Add to that working a bit late today followed with an exceptionally crowded and frustrating grocery shopping expedition and all I'll have made before Friday is a salad.

But Friday should prove interesting and just in case anyone is actually looking here for ideas for what to do with their CSA share I wanted to point out this idea while you still had your callaloo to use (unlike me. I opened his refrigerator yesterday to discover that my callaloo had wilted and blackened like a Nazi at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. You guys with full shares have had a bit of practice; how are you storing this stuff?). I had been poking around on-line looking for an alternative to callaloo soup or crab and callaloo both of which include okra which I don't feel up to just now. I mentioned pepper pot on Saturday I think, but it turns out I was thinking of another recipe with the same name: Caribbean pepper pot doesn't really appeal.

I found some more interesting recipes when I learned that callaloo is also called dasheen. In particular, I thought the recipes for Oil Down looked worth a try. From what I can tell, the Grenadian version has callaloo, but the Trinidadian version doesn't. It's pretty simple: salt meat of any description simmered with breadfruit, coconut milk and aromatics (and maybe some dumplings) until all of the coconut is absorbed except a bit of oil down at the bottom of the pot. I think the sort of salt pork we can get here is fattier than what the recipe authors are thinking of, but the salt cod we can get should be fine and I did find salt beef at my local Publix that should work. I've never had breadfruit before so I'm looking forward to trying it.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dahseen is something else entirely- it's related to malanga, taro & the ornamental 'elephant ear' plants. There's a lot of confusion about 'callaloo', as the term is used to refer to more than one (unrelated) vegetable, as you have experienced firsthand in your recipes researches.
Keep up the good experiments!

billjac said...

There is no quicker route to enlightenment than posting misinformation on the Internet. Consider me corrected. So I saw the term explicitly "callaloo" used for young dasheen, but I take it that that's not what showed up in our shares. Which sort of callaloo is used in Grenadian oil down?

Anonymous said...

Regarding the storage of our CSA produce: I broke down and bought Green Bags after seeing a late-night infomercial. They work fairly well and I say they extend the life by at least one week. http://www.greenbags.com/
--Sarah C.