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.
