Making it Paradise...bits of Bajan life

 I always seem to find the gardeners in any neighbourhood I move into. Maybe I can smell the dirt under their skins as well! My neighbour Ken (I mean he lives in my neighbourhood, not next door...lol) is one such person. Ken has the garden of my dreams!   Ken has a huge 600 ft garden and what's especially impressive about that is the fact that it's smack dab in the middle of urban Barbados AND Kens works a full time job. Ken practices crop rotation and unless he is resting his soil, his garden is always such a beauty to look forward to in passing. He sells his produce in and around the neighbourhood old school style walking door to door with a tray on Sunday mornings. It always takes me back to my childhood days in the country where a constant feature of our Sunday mornings was someone passing by selling home grown lettuce fresh for the day's lunch salad. He also retails juices made from the herbs and fruits in the garden and I must tell you, his passion fruit juice is a...

I have to make a confession. Recently I have been cheating on flying fish ...A LOT...with potfish.  I know I used to be a die hard flying fish girl and who could argue..... it is such a soft, delicious, quick and easy to prepare fish. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that while I LOVE flying fish steamed, noone else in my family does, they only like it fried and while I grew up attacking fish heads on a regular (lol) my children find this head on business traumatizing (little punks). And so, I have been scouting for new fish to add to my menu. Dolphin or Mahi-Mahi as we now call it (being very politically correct for tourists traumatized by their own nightmares of eating Flipper) is pretty OK too along with the other big fish offered in the market, but with pollution and mercury issues I try to refrain from eating big fish. So enter my new love affair with little fishes! You must know however that potfish is not easily available at every fish market. I am now actu...

If you have never eaten gooseberries you are seriously missing out... check out my daughter "enjoying" these sour delicacies...lol The gooseberry most common here Barbados is the Amlak gooseberry.  The fruit grow in compact clusters making for abundant harvests......YES!!!!! This particular variety of gooseberry is known as the lucky tree in Thailand and is called star gooseberry. The Indians produce an excellent oil from the seed for the hair called Amla Oil. It works wonders for softening and darkening hair. In fact,  some of you may be reading and thinking these are not gooseberrie and indeed they are not the gooseberyy common to more temperate zones. In fact I do have an actual gooseberry shrub which I purchased at Agrofest some two years ago. Notice the difference! But....back to the gooseberries in the house! My sister called yesterday from her sis-in-law's wanting to know how could she use up a bumper crop. Well needless t...