A Good Friday Feast – Caribbean Style

Greetings,

The time is 5:31am and I’ve just woken up about 20 minutes ago. You know that “Rambo style” of sleep on a night with no power aka no fan where you wake up on a bare mattress sweating and exchanging salts with some fabric that usually lays below the sheets, yeah that kind of stuff. I had the pleasure of having a ridiculous “Ron Don” which is basically the traditional island dish consisting of stupid amounts of seafood. It’s Easter Monday but let’s discuss Good Friday, yes?

So here’s the long and short of it, you take coconuts and I’m talking like 18 coconuts for the one we had, you find someone to grate it for you as grating one single coconut is tough work, 18 or so is just a marathon.  You squeeze the milk out of it, throw it in a massive vat and start stirring until it comes to a boil. You need to keep stirring to ensure a creamy broth, if not the milk splits and its garbage aka mix it up with some rotten cabbage and feed it to a pig.

Next up, you add stupid amounts of seafood. I’m talking getting carried away where the lady who is in charge and most certainly an accomplished mother / grandmother starts refusing creatures from the sea as the stew is already “sufficient”. By “sufficient” she means that it can feed 40-50 hungry people. We stacked this Ron Don with lobster, barracuda, mackerel, yellow tail, grunt, shrimps, cassava, breadfruit, potatoes and more.

Since it was so massive, everyone in eye sight got a solid portion. Also, other random people who looked like they didn’t have a “thing” to go to were also invited by random rogues of the island, like me. End of the day, you can’t beat hanging out with family on Easter but if you’re not in the mood to fly a few thousand miles for a ham dinner, this was the next best thing.

In other news, a pirate friend of mine caught a monster from shore but more on that later.

Big thanks to Lucila at 3 Brothers and her crew for putting this together, awesome.

Tips hat,