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World Cup food blogging – Trinidad and Tobago

Thankfully, we did manage to beat T&T, despite the fact that Peter Crouch just isn’t good enough to play for England and Sven seems to have sucked all the creativity out of the players like some Swedish football-vampyr.

Anyway, I cooked some Trini food today to mark the occasion. The recipe was from Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian Cookbook which I think is excellent despite being non-veggy myself. The idea was something caled ‘doubles’, which is a Trinidadian fast food consisting of chickpeas in a sandwich between two deep-fried flatbreads (like puri). The breads are called ‘fry bakes’ in Trinidad, apparently, because they’re fried instead of baked. I didn’t feel like deep-frying bread today, so I made some T&T-style roti instead.

There were actually two Trinidadian chickpea recipes in the book; both are obviously based on Indian food, but the one I did was probably the less distinctively T&T of the two. The other one used rather un-Indian ingredients like thyme and chives; this one was made with chickpeas, onion, garlic, green chillies, tinned tomato, cumin, coriander, ground ginger, curry powder and turmeric.

The roti were made from half-and-half plain flour and bread flour, some baking powder, water, and a smidge of turmeric for colour.

So, roti and chickpeas. Have ’em with some mango chutney and pepper sauce. I rolled my roti into a burrito-y thing, which was messy (though delicious), but I didn’t get a picture of the rolled version.

3 replies on “World Cup food blogging – Trinidad and Tobago”

Those chickpeas make me want to lick the monitor. I’ve found that to be really unsatisfactory. If I look pathetic, will you give me the recipe? *looks pathetic* Worth a shot anyway.

2 medium onions, finely chopped
6 cloves garlic, crushed
1 tablespoon ground cumin
1 tbsp ground coriander
1/4 tsp turmeric
1 tbsp curry powder
1 tsp ground ginger
1 fresh chilli, finely chopped
1 400g can of chopped tomatoes
3 tins of chickpeas, rinsed and drained

in a largish pan: lightly brown the onions, then add the garlic and stir just for about 30sec, do the same with the spices, add the tomatoes, stir in and cook for a minute, add about 560ml of water, a teaspoon of salt and the chickpeas; bring to the boil and simmer for 10 minutes.

Main thing is to have the tomatoes ready, so you don’t burn the spices.

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