Secret Ingredient Improv IV: A Caribbean trip

It is Friday again which means I get to go shopping for ingredients and watch how Ian "transforms" them into dinner. I don't like shopping alone. I also don't like spending a lot of time in the supermarket either. Ian does. Ian in the supermarket is like a lady in a shoe shop. He has to pick up every bottle, jar or can and consider buying it, especially if he cannot read the labels. I, on the other hand, only go shopping with a list in my hand. I can't just casually walk into a supermarket and buy a jar of Branston pickle. I'm like the guy who needs a new pair of jeans so he walks in the first store and buys a pair of jeans and drives back home. Done.

I have a lot of difficulty putting four ingredients together for our improv cooking nights. I don't want to make it too easy, I don't want to make it too hard and most importantly I want to have a nice dinner. For me the improv cooking is not about weird ingredients. It is about experience. It is about forcing Ian to cook with something he has little experience with. For me it is all about learning and knowing the ingredients and once in a week having the courage to think out of the box and create a new thing.

A long time ago, Ian bought this jar of rocoto peppers which we ended up never using. So that automatically goes on the list. I hate it when we buy things and don't use them. I got an email from a blog reader, Kendall, who had mango on his list and we have actually never cooked with mango before, we only eat it as a fruit so I thought that will be interesting. I also get some chicken tights because I wanted chicken and not fish sticks for dinner. And finally I get some plantains. I think I just crave fried plantains.

So these are my four ingredients for Ian:

Rocoto peppers
Mango
Chicken thighs
Plantains

I myself thought to make a sauce for the chicken out of the rocoto peppers and the mango. The sweet and spicy are known to go well together and serve it with a side of fried plantains, I know, not very imaginative and if Ian does it I will tell him he wasn't very creative and didn't really transform the ingredients. So let's see what Ian ends up doing.

IAN:
She didn't know it, but Mariam was being nice to me this time. After my disappointing performance on my first try at this, I was rather relieved to see this combination of ingredients. Upon first laying eyes on them, I immediately recognized a sort of logic to these ingredients - whether she knew it or not, Mariam had selected a group of ingredients that went together. To be sure, I had never cooked with this combination before - indeed, as she said, I had never really cooked with mangoes before at all. But nevertheless, these ingredients immediately spoke to me, and they said, "Think Caribbean." And that was it - I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

I wanted to marinate the chicken for a bit, so I got to work on that immediately. I thought to make something like a red jerk marinade for the chicken, and started it off with some tomato sauce. To this I added ginger paste, a bit of Worcestershire, cayenne, cloves, allspice, nutmeg, cumin, thyme, black pepper, paprika, granulated garlic, smoked sea salt, and the juice of half an orange. This was enough dry ground spices to render the tomato sauce base to a runny paste consistency with a spicy, dark flavor, which is just how I wanted it. The chicken was trimmed of excess fat, and tossed into this mix to sit for a while as I prepared other things.

With that done, I turned my attention to the plantains. Now, if you've never used or eaten plantains before, you could be forgiven for thinking to treat them like a banana - they are certainly related to bananas, and look basically like large, straight bananas. However, plantains need to be cooked - raw plantains, especially when they're green, aren't very good. Ripe yellow plantains have a flavor that reminds me more of apples than bananas, and cooked green plantains are starchy like potatoes. The plantains that Mariam got for me caused me to pause for a moment, however - are they green or yellow? Truthfully, they appeared to be somewhere in between - semiripe, I suppose. Sweet plantains, when they're fried, get carmelized and taste sweeter than I wanted for this meal, so I decided to try to treat them like green plantains and hope for some starchiness. I decided to make mashed plantains (like mashed potatoes) and peeled them before setting them to cook through in a pan with a bit of olive oil.

So while those cooked up to get nice and soft for mashing, I began my plans for the mango and rocotos. These would go into a mango salsa made from chopped red onion and tomato, minced garlic, chopped rocoto pepper (with the seed and membrane removed), and chopped mango. I finished it off with a dash of salt and pepper, a little key lime juice, and some fresh minced cilantro.

By this point, the plantains had finished cooking through, so they were mashed up in a bowl, and combined with some sauteed minced red onion and garlic. With mashed potatoes, I tend to moisten them and add some creaminess by mixing in some milk, but that didn't seem appropriate with the plantains. However, they definitely needed moisture to hold together better - they were certainly starchy, as I had hoped, but also drier than a typical potato. To keep with the Caribbean theme, I used coconut milk for moisture, and with some salt and pepper, the mashed plantains were completed.

All there was left to do was remove the chicken from the marinade and cook them through in a pan with a bit of oil. This would have been better to do on the grill, but ours is out of gas right now. Even so, just a bit of time on each side is enough to cook through these chicken thighs without overdoing them. After all the chicken was cooked and resting, I poured the remaining marinade in the pan to reduce to a thick, pasty jerk sauce.

So I had prepared Red Jerk Marinated Chicken Thighs with Coconut Mashed Plantains and Mango-Rocoto Salsa, which I plated as so:

Wow! Isn't this beautiful. It certainly looks like something you would get at a really fancy restaurant. The colors are bright and appetizing and I can't wait to taste it. The chicken is cooked well but it is really spicy. I don't mind that at all; it was a compliment. I really liked the idea of coconut milk in the mashed plantain. The salsa looks and tastes really good and I will definitely try to make it again. I only have one criticism. The chicken is really hot and full of spices. The mashed plantain is thick and rich. I think if the salsa were not spicy it could have given a refreshing element to the dish. But again I don't mind too spicy so I was overall really happy. The only thing that disappointed me was that everything on the plate was really cold. Ian spent too much time plating the dish and taking the perfect picture. I had to put my whole plate in the microwave for a couple minutes which ended up cooking the salsa too. Altogether it was a very successful dish and I will definitely recommend it and make it again myself.