TriniGourmet

Dear Reader One of the biggest mistakes I see home cooks make is rushing the exact step that gives a dish its confidence. Take a classic dish like a Sunday "stew chicken". Browning the meat isn't about colour for the camera. When the seasoned pieces hit the pot and everything sizzles, I'm listening, for the aromatics to wake up, for the meat to start to "spring water," as my father called it. When the kitchen smells like memory instead of raw ingredients. Rush that step, and the gravy feels...

Dear Reader, A while back I was going over a blog post I'd written about the ten Trini ingredients every kitchen needs. Rereading it now, one line still holds up: chadon beni changes everything. Bold, citrusy, a little garlicky, and (to me) considerably different from its cousin, cilantro. When a dish doesn't come out tasting "right," the instinct is often to add more. More seasoning, more spice, more of everything, hoping volume covers for precision. It rarely works. The other instinct is to...

Dear Reader, Have you ever had one of those moments where you realise you've been eating something your whole life, but you don't actually know how to make it? That was me, more than two decades ago, in a kitchen in Connecticut, homesick and wrestling with that exact question. My mother is Jamaican, my father Trinidadian. An excellent cook, he only made a handful of Trini dishes at home. We rarely ate out, so what I knew of our cuisine came mostly from school “tuck shops” and visits to other...

Dear Reader, A few months ago, I stood at my stove stirring pelau and felt my father in the kitchen with me. No rush. No recipe pulled up on the phone. Just seasoning with care and tasting with joy, the way it's supposed to go. Every Carnival Sunday, he made a large pot. Enough to carry us through Ash Wednesday. When I left Trinidad for college in the US, he handed me a folded piece of paper. His pelau recipe. Handwritten. I still have it. It's laminated now. There's something about a...

Dear Reader, Wow, it's May already. We're nearly at the halfway point of 2026, and I am still trying to figure out where the time went. Do you feel the same? Maybe it's the speed of life right now, but I've been feeling very nostalgic lately. With Mother's Day on the horizon and Indian Arrival Day coming at the end of the month, it feels like exactly the right time to share the story behind "7 Sweet Trini Treats," my very first ebook, which I created in 2011 and brought back last year. I've...

Dear Reader, I'm writing this on a quiet Easter Sunday evening. Day 3 of a 4-day holiday weekend here in Trinidad & Tobago. Wherever you are in the world when you read this, I hope you're feeling safe, secure, and looking forward to the month ahead. This is my birthday month 🎂 and I'll be honest I still get giddy, even as the half-century mark fast approaches. Last year, my birthday was marked by something I didn't plan and didn't expect. A small gathering. A table of people who love local...

Dear Reader, I’m writing this on a quiet Saturday evening, preparing some cornmeal porridge for my mother, grateful for this calm after the frenzy of the now concluded Carnival season. However, this being Trinidad, the holidays never really stop. This month we will be observing 2 more, Eid-Ul-Fitr (tentatively on the 20th) and Spiritual Baptist Liberation Day (30th). You can find menu inspiration for both here and here. Those older posts are a reminder to me that In October TriniGourmet turns...

Dear Reader, Most people think that the secret to authentic Trini cooking is more ingredients, more technique, more precision. In my experience? That’s exactly what gets in the way. There’s that old adage that grandmothers don’t measure. They just know. A pinch of this. A handful of that. Recipe card optional. No tutorial. And somehow, SOMEHOW, it always tasted like home. Years ago, I stood in my kitchen trying to recreate a dish my Jamaican mother used to make from memory. One she learned...

Dear Reader, It may only be the second month of the new year, but it already feels like time is rushing by. Do you feel the same? Here in Trinidad, we’re already in the middle of the Carnival season, and right in the middle of this month we have Valentine’s Day (14), Carnival Monday and Tuesday (16, 17) and the start of the Lunar New Year (17), all falling rapidly after one another. It’s a time of year when a lot of us are going to be cooking food for others, and possibly also experimenting...

Dear Reader, Happy New Year! I’m wishing you everything you wish for yourself, and hoping we all close out 2026 in even better places than we’ve started it. Today I wanted to touch on a question that I get a lot of the time. “Is it still authentic if I swap ingredients?” Here’s something that took me a long time to learn… Authenticity in Caribbean cooking isn’t about rigid perfection. It’s about connection. For years, I carried this guilt around modernizing recipes. Every time I wanted to...