Breadfruit Fiasco

Justin bought me a cookbook when we first arrived in Grenada. I was wary of the kitchen and required a guide to help me acclimate. The cookbook did help quell my fears for a while I gained culinary courage. I eventually broadened my horizons and left my Caribbean cookbook behind. My cookbook was rediscovered the other day and I felt terrible that I'd set it aside for so long. Browsing through landed me on page 10 where I saw the recipe for breadfruit pies. Of course, I chose to make breadfruit pies.

For those of you who have not seen a breadfruit...

..that is breadfruit. A weird name for a weird fruit. Breadfruit tastes like a savory potato. It's starchy and more bitter than sweet. Grenadians use it in stews and soups alongside potatoes, yams, tannia, and is central in Grenada's national dish oildown.

[A historical reflection by a local man: I heard from a guy that breadfruit trees were imported into Grenada to feed the slaves being brought in from Africa. Breadfruit trees produce multiple large fruits and have more than one annual harvest. The trees were sent in ships along with slaves and were given preferential treatment over slaves by slave masters because of their ability to feed so many at such low cost. Part of his story is verified here.]

My recipe required me to boil, mash, and create dough with breadfruit (with a touch of flour and butter).

(Can you tell that this is going to go terribly wrong?)

Here's my dough. Essentially I'm using it to make a savory meat handpie.
The meat filling was flavoured with lovely fresh herbs...

...minced veggies.

 ...and was sautéed . In the meantime, I had left my dough to cool then rolled it out in preparation for filling. The dough said no. This stuff was the stickiest substance I had ever touched. Check out my hands on the left upper corner of the picture.  Now go back up and look at the dough photo. Sticky mess.

Seriously, this stuff was a disaster. Words cannot describe the what have I done?! feeling. To make matters worse, I was starving. The combination did me in and I decided to scrap the entire business and eat nothing. Forever.

Thankfully my reasonable husband came to my rescue and helped me find myself again. Together we spent an HOUR taking the sticky mess, bending it to our wills, and producing something that resembled a hand pie.

To my great surprise, it worked! And they were beautiful. The breadfruit retained its distinctive yellow colour but the crumb coating deepened into a rich brown. Better yet, they were tasty! 

I will never again make these but my bad experience gave me another reason to admire my husband. Seriously, I would have thrown a temper tantrum without his level-headed optimism. 

They say marriage grows you as an individual. I definitely believe them.

My future plans with breadfruit are still tentative. I'll definitely be a little less ambitious than I was this day. Justin liked the pies and likes breadfruit so we will meet again one day. This time I'll be ready.

Instagram: Update

Technology can't be avoided forever. I've made a point of learning enough to get by but little enough to avoid trouble. Avoiding trouble isn't as simple as moms would have you believe.
I really want to improve this blog so I've begun the cold wade into the river of information on blogs, code, images (and other things I haven't had time to google yet). 
My first endeavour was instagram. I use instagram on my ipod. That's easy. I've noticed bloggers using instagram photos on their blogs and really, that did me in. It can't be that difficult to link instagram to blogger.  Despite a teensy bit of...tension, I got it going.

So check out my new instagram feed on the righthand sidebar underneath the post archive. It'll circulate my five most recent photos. I'm guessing that you can scroll through my other photos as well.

My adventure means that I was sidetracked from a real post. I'll make up for it soon.
In the meantime, enjoy my recent instagram photo of a sleeping Zoey.

Note: as you can tell by the photo's fuzziness, I really haven't figured this out yet..