Wow. That was a challenge. Apparently papayas are hard to come by in March in Charlotte, North Carolina. Who knew? Apparently I should have after all of my talk of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, etc. Good-ness.
Well, we improvised with a mango…but I forgot that instead of a seed mangoes have a fibrous core…hard to spoon that out and stuff it with meat. So, we improvised again and just sliced it and piled the meat on top and baked it all. Not so pretty, but pretty tasty. Who would have thought the taste of fruit and meat is actually intriguing. Anyway!
The produce we collected for our special meal.
The beginnings of our meat filling. Looks…gross…right? Let's be honest.
The meat mixture over the sliced mangoes ready to go in the oven.
Ingredients for something I KNEW I couldn't screw up…fried bananas! Mmmm.
The whole meal set out. Meat over Mangoes. Corn Fritters. Fried Bananas. Very healthy.
A better view of the Meat over Mango. The parmesan on top made it taste yummy, but I questioned the authenticity…although, it is a cheese that keeps well…so maybe it IS authentically Haitian.
Twig1 with our dinner reading. "A Haitian Story of Hope. Selavi." It talked about Haitian orphans who banded together, and it's a true story. Even though the children were subject to police brutality, corruption, hunger, fear, and violence…they had hope and eventually created a radio station for children to bring hope to other children through the airwaves.
And, I was right about one thing. Yipes. A very, very, very messy kitchen. Good thing Husband is helpful on the clean-up.
Because we had a HUGE HUGE mess.
Husband said he was nervous with this challenge. He was nervous to eat my food. He said that any food he has ever had in Haiti has been…mmm…how to put it sweetly…gross. But, he enjoyed the meal we had tonight…probably because I picked food that was still within my "culinary point of view" (I like to pretend I'm on the Food Channel).
It was a lot of work to create an entirely new meal, something that I had never done before. There was a lot of frying involved…which I'm not great at. And, it's a mess. We enjoyed reading the story about Haiti and then being able to explain to Twig1 and Twig2 why the food seemed weird or different to them. LOVED that. I loved being able to show my children a taste (no pun intended…BUT, it works!) of a different culture.
I'll include the recipes, should you desire to try them, with the reflection tomorrow.