Kitchen Adventures: Salt Cay Edition

On our way to lunch one day, we ran into a local guy who we'd met earlier in the week (it's a small island), and he asked us if we wanted some lobster. We ended up with four small, just-caught lobster tails for free. We were planning to find Kevin the fisherman and buy snapper from him for dinner, but figured we'd go with the lobster instead. We asked the owner of the restaurant where we ate lunch to keep the lobster in her fridge for a couple of hours until we headed back to our beach house. (We were on our bikes, and it was way too hot to carry fresh lobster around all afternoon.)

Raw materials: lobster, onions, lemon/limes, and plenty of melted butter

View from the grill

View in the grill

You'll notice an absence of anything green in this meal. It's very hard to get fresh produce on Salt Cay. They don't grow any of their own because the wild donkeys eat everything, and it's expensive and inconvenient to get produce from other islands in the area. We thought we would try to supplement our meal with cactus pears. These particular cactus pears looked pretty but didn't taste very good, which was a shame because they're labor-intensive. Taison was in charge of burning off the spines and peeling them.

For an island with limited access to groceries and only three restaurants, we ate well. We had lots of conch (conch fritters, conch stew, fried conch, conch empanadas), an amazing curried banana soup, delicious barbequed ribs, whole fried snapper, and curried goat. There was also plenty of rum punch and a refreshing alcoholic ginger beer that's made on Grand Turk, the next island over.

 Conch empanadas

Hard ginger beer-perfect with whole snapper, cole slaw and red beans and rice

 Conch fritters

This is what your kitchen would look like if you were a lighthouse keeper in the 1800s

Grand Turk Lighthouse