Food!

I thought I would do a post describing all the delicious food I have been eating this semester!

Bake and Shark: This is amazing! It’s home is Maracas Beach (it was featured on the Travel Channel I think), and when you go to the beach there are stands and stands selling bake and shark everywhere. It’s also a popular street food at Carnival, but it’s best at Maracas. Bake and Shark is a fried shark fillet (the shark) inside of a fried bread dough (the bake). It comes with various vegetables at most places, but the stand I usually get it from at Maracas lets you dress it up yourself. I always pile it high with pineapple, lettuce, tomato, cucumber, onion, ketchup, and garlic sauce. This makes it really messy, but it is so delicious!

Doubles: Doubles are another popular street food, but they are more common at breakfast. Doubles are a fried batter with curried channa (chickpeas) inside, which sometimes has a sweet mango sauce as well.

Pholourie: Pholourie is an Indian food. It’s fried cornmeal dough (are you seeing a trend here?), kind of shaped like donut holes, that you eat hot with a spicy sweet mango sauce.

Roti: Roti is an East Indian food. You can get several different kinds, but my favorite is just the channa (chickpeas) and potato with buss up shut. The channa and potatoes are curried, and you eat it with the buss up shut, which is ripped up pieces of the roti skin (I guess it’s kind of like a cornmeal tortilla? I don’t really know how to describe it). You eat the channa by tearing off a piece of the buss up shut and pinching pieces of the channa. It’s messy, but so good! And cheap.

Produce: There is so much cheap, fresh produce here, it’s amazing. The Tunapuna market has everything. I get fresh mangos, pineapple, and watermelon all the time, and you can even buy imported Washington apples! The fruit is so good and so ripe, and I’m definitely going to miss it when I’m home.

KFC: Fried chicken is big here. There are three major fried chicken chains here (KFC, Royal Castle Chicken, and Church’s Chicken), but KFC is definitely the biggest. The KFC on the Brian Lara Promenade in Port of Spain is the busiest and most profitable KFC in the world, and it is open 24 hours a day. KFC’s are everywhere, and I have even seen numerous ones with playgrounds, kind of like how McDonald’s has playgrounds at home. I have eaten at KFC more this semester (about 3 times) than I have in the last probably 5 years of my life. Like I said, Trinis like their fried chicken.

Creole food: Creole food is delicious, but it’s not as easy to find as most of the East Indian food. My favorite is pelau, which is rice and chicken, but there is also other food as well.

Sauces: Trinis love their sauces on everything. Pepper sauce is ridiculously spicy, and you can get it on anything! You learn quickly to just ask for no pepper, unless you have a strong tolerance for heat. French fries are slathered in ketchup, barbecue sauce, garlic sauce, mayo, you name it, and eaten with a fork usually because they are so covered you can’t actually pick up the fries. Pizza is liberally doused in ketchup, and when people go to Subway to get sandwiches they sometimes get large amounts of five or six sauces on their subs. I get weird looks at home for not really liking ketchup or mayo, but that is nothing compared to the looks I get when I don’t put sauce on my food here!

There’s other random food here, but this is the basics of what I have been eating!