Making it Paradise...bits of Bajan life

Being from an incredibly lactose intolerant family, all my life I have been acutely aware of my dairy intake. When I became a mother, I breastfed for as long as was practical, but weaning time was inevitable and so began my affair with homemade coconut milk. Coconut milk is a great option for infants with its high fat content much like breast milk. As my children grew, I found it an easy and cheap alternative to add to cereals, porridge, muffins, cakes etc. I usually buy dried coconuts for Bds$1.00 each. I get them from the same guy we purchase our coconut water from every Sunday. Five dollars later, I have more than enough milk for the week! Super easy to make and very versatile in use, here's how you can make your very own batch of coconut milk. People resort to all kinds of options when opening up a coconut, and here's my method. Simply place the coconut on the ground and take a hammer to it. It will break into fragments. I then use a butter knife (dull blade) to pry t...

Three gabled chattel house.......beautifully maintained. I love chattel houses. I view them with equal amounts of admiration and envy. I often openly declare that any house I build will definitely be from wood and include features of the chattel house. Now ridiculed as the house of choice for the poor, the chattel house's design is ideal for our climate and to me personally, possess more charm and character than any structure built of cement.  On typically hot days their pointed and "louvred" roofs keep rooms cool. Shutter windows allow dwellers to see out but maintain privacy. And do you remember the doors that could be opened in halves just like the windows? You pushed the top half open with a prop stick while the other half remained latched!  I remember as a child laying in bed many a night listening to the boards of our home creak as they shrunk once again after a days beating from the sun. I also loved to look up close at the wood patterns glo...

I love a good mystery. Barbados has a few good mysteries of its own and I am intrigued by each and every one, but maybe none occupy my fascination as much as the Baobab tree at Queen's Par k . The baobab is a HUGE tree native to West Africa but lo and behold we have two here! Thing is they are not even in close proximity to each other, so the mystery deepens of where did these ancient trees come from? We can never know of the tree's origins for certain but we assume seeds floated to our shores given our far easterly location in the Caribbean chain. While other Caribbean islands have baobab trees, their ages are very young in comparison, maybe implying they were brought over by slaves to this part of the world. Which reminds of the cutest story Dave Bynoe sold me one day. He said "Oh, didn't you know, the seed of the tree at Queen's Park was brought over by a young slave boy. He held that seed in his mouth for the entire journey from Africa to Barbados...

"Mom,mom, the snow cone van!" I can't tell you how many times I have been busy at some task only to be interrupted by this cry from my children.Of course I had already heard the parm, parm of  the old time bicycle horn which every snow cone seller in Barbados still uses to this day!You know the one, big black pump topped with silver metal horns. But to be honest I also love to welcome that sound. On a brutally hot day (and we have seen many of those lately), the sound of that horn is like music to the ears. You can drink a whole lot more snow cones than beers..:). While money is retrieved from purses and wallets, everyone starts to run through their options of flavours. I am always torn between tamarind and ginger, the partner is a strictly coconut with lots of milk kinda man and the children love to invent new combinations each time. I recall pineapple/ tamarind/ coconut, ginger/tamarind, coconut/ginger, coconut/orange/milk .....too many to list and not all pretty ...