Trini Food

One of the unique experiences here in Trinidad & Tobago is the food. I have experienced a lot of new foods since I've been here. I thought I should "share" a few of them with you. All of these are dinners that friends or neighbors have made for me.

The first one is pretty basic, grilled chicken with macaroni pie. The green stuff is callaloo. It's a green vegetable, kind of like spinach. They mix it with pigeon peas and seasonings into this mushy sauce. The red stuff is like a potato salad, except it's made with bread fruit, this large starchy fruit that grows on trees, but they cut it up and use it like a potato. The red color is because they put beets in it.




They eat a ton of chicken down here. In fact, KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken) is located at nearly every major intersection. In fact, the KFC that sells the most chicken in the world happens to be right here in Port of Spain.

The next one here is pelau. It could be considered the traditional meal of Trinidad. It's more common than chicken noodle soup in the USA. Pelau is a mixture of chicken (although it is sometimes made with beef or goat, which is real common here), rice, pigeon peas (a small bean) all of which is browned in a caramelized sugar. It's typically served with a side salad.


Because of the large Indian population, curry is real popular. They like to wrap curried meats with potatoes, pumpkin and other stuff in roti, which is an Indian flat bread. There are roti shops in every neighborhood, their version of fast food.



This next one is the favorite at the beaches, Shark and Bake (or sometimes called Bake and Shark). The serve it at stands set up right at the beach. It's shark meat dipped in spicy seasonings, deep fried and put into a bun, which is also deep fried. There is a condiments bar with a ton of toppings to put on it. They are really good...


This one I have yet to try. It was delivered tonight, but I already had dinner, so I am going to save it for tomorrow. This is the ever popular cow heel soup. It's made with cow feet and a variety of vegetables, depending on the cook. This one includes corn on the cob, potatoes, pumpkin, some local things which I don't recall, and for extra flavor, they throw in little green boiled bananas! I'll have to let you know later how this one tastes...