Another island country this time! I actually made food for St. Kitts last weekend, but either forgot or didn't have the time or just didn't feel like writing up this post until now. I had high hopes for this meal, since I love coconut, dumplings, plantains, and spicy things. So coconut dumplings and spicy plantains sounded great!
I started the coconut dumplings first. A simple mix of shaved coconut, flour, oil, butter (not sure why it needed both), salt and water.
It comes together quickly into a stiff dough that's kneaded for a few minutes until soft enough to roll out.
Once it's rolled out, it's cut into individual dumplings.
None of the recipes I found told me what size or shape to make the dumplings, but one picture I found showed them as small discs, so that's what I did with these.
While I waited for a big pot of salted water to boil on the stove for cooking the dumplings, I prepared the spicy plantains. I started with slicing them into pieces, then added grated onion and fresh ginger with a bit of salt.
The plantains are then mixed with hot sauce or chopped chili peppers. I chose hot sauce because it was easier and I always have plenty on hand. I went with this mango habanero from a local hot sauce company because I thought the flavors would work well with everything else.
The plantains are fried in oil until golden while the dumplings boil for about 10 minutes in the salted water. These two "sides" are often served with saltfish in St. Kitts, but I just served them on their own.
The plantains were the better part of the plate, but were not quite ripe enough to be perfectly enjoyable. They were still a little too starchy and tough, but still had a good flavor with the hot sauce, ginger, and onion. The dumplings were a little disappointing, though. I ended up making a soy sauce dip for them because they were a little bland. They probably would have been better if served with some kind of stew where they could soak up some flavor and liquid. On their own, there wasn't enough flavor there--I might not have salted the boiling water enough--and I think if coconut milk was added to the dough instead of water I would have enjoyed them more. They were also way too dense and gummy. Again, if served with stew I could see them being softer and lighter with more liquid. Maybe also a different, lighter, type of flour would have been better.
Those might also be reasons why I wasn't super eager to post this one. The foods were pretty unremarkable, but would probably taste better if you tried it while actually in St. Kitts. I'm sure they know what they're doing better than I do.
Also: I'm going to start adding links to my reference recipes to the bottom of each post. I figured even though I'm not posting the recipes themselves in these posts, I should still give credit where its due. The added benefit is that anyone reading these will have references if they want to try as well!
Recipes used: Coconut Dumplings and Spicy Plantains
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