Celebrating two years: Pitcairn Island arrowroot pie

Whilst working our way through this challenge, although we’ve encountered many foods and cooking styles that we haven’t tried before, it’s been unusual for us to come across a country that we’ve never heard of. The Pitcairn Islands, though, were an exception! A group of four islands in the southern Pacific Ocean, the Pitcairn Islands are a British Overseas Territory, apparently most famous as the hideaway settlement for the notorious HMS Bounty mutineers (but not famous enough for us to know that without consulting Lonely Planet).

The other distincti thing about the Pitcairn Islands is that their population is somewhere around the 50 mark, making it the least populous nation in the world. Unsurprisingly, then, recipes are few and far between! There is actually a cookbook out there, called (creatively) Pitcairn Island Cookbook, but not having a copy of that left us at the hands of Google, which yielded a total of two options: some sort of baked pumpkin and coconut milk concoction, and a pineapple and arrowroot pie. We opted for the latter, with a slightly vague recipe from Elite Life that required a few guesses and some instinct!

An adventure in ingredients: Grenadian oil down

We would recommend having the following before attempting this recipe:
– A small army to feed (or the common sense to scale down the recipe)
– An enormous cooking pot (or the common sense to scale down the recipe)
– Access to a wide range of ingredients

Now that we have that settled…

Oil down is the national dish of the Caribbean island of Grenada (not to be confused with the Spanish city Granada), so named because of the oils released from the coconut milk as it simmers. It is a big stew, packed full of a long list of ingredients, some we’d eaten before and some we hadn’t. We got our recipe for oil down from Becca at Meat Loves Salt, and would suggest reading her post about it for a lot more insight than we can provide and more Caribbean ingredient recommendations (we had to make a few substitutions). What we can offer, however, is the experiences of total novices. Our recipe below, therefore, is based on Becca’s, but also anecdotal.

Mega mac and cheese: Sammarinese nidi di rondine

It’s kind of ironic that we’re posting this recipe today, because it’s the total opposite of the way we’ve been eating lately. Last weekend, we returned from a holiday in Australia which was full of indulging in the nation’s finest seafood, wines and ice cream (to name a few delicacies). Since returning home, we’ve been rather more abstinent – which is definitely not a word you would use to describe San Marino’s national dish, nidi di rondine (swallows’ nests), which we made and ate before we went away. With a list of ingredients that mainly centres around cheese, meat and pasta, this is definitely an indulgence – but such a worthy one! We got our recipe from All That Cooking.

In memory of Crabby: Trinbagonian callaloo

Sometimes in life, the effort you put into something is disproportionate to the reward you get from it. It’s just one of those things.

Another one of those things is that sometimes in life, you can’t help but sit back and think, ‘Well, I’m glad that’s over.’

Our callaloo experience was, if nothing else, memorable.

Seven years of frying: Tibetan shapale

Regular readers will have noticed that we tend to follow a rough geographical order when making our international recipes, so would rightly be slightly confused by the fact that we’ve now jumped from Bermuda to Tibet. This is because when we started this project, our list of countries followed a rule whereby each country bordered the countries on either side of it on the list, but there was no way to take this linear approach and also include all the countries – so we have a separate list of ‘leftover’ countries. Now that we’ve reached the Caribbean islands (of which there are a lot, and if the Pacific Islands are anything to go by, they’re all likely to offer up quite similar foods), we thought we’d intersperse them with those leftover countries. So: Tibet.

A Bermuda short: Bermudian fish chowder

Before making this dish, we knew two things about Bermuda: shorts and Triangle. We’ve now bumped this up to three things, having added its traditional fish chowder to our repertoire. Unlike the creamy, thick chowders we’re used to, Bermuda’s version has a tomato base and isn’t stodgy at all. It’s also very spicy, thanks to the addition of chilli sauce (more on that in a minute) and is so full of vegetables that ‘fish chowder’ is almost a misnomer. Recipes on the Internet are all pretty similar but we thought The Bermudian seemed a reputable enough source – we just made a few tweaks here and there.

Yankee foodle dandy: American meatloaf, pancakes, chicken and biscuits, and apple pie

We’ve only been to the USA once, in August 2013, when we visited Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and New York City. We were there for ten days and were overwhelmed by the size of everything (security queues at Dulles Airport, hotel rooms, food portions, personalities, buildings, roads, monuments, duration of baseball games…) – but in such a good way. We crammed a lot into our relatively short stay, and fell in love with the Land of Liberty, and we can’t wait to go back!

Of course, for us, a major part of any successful holiday is the food. As well as trying to follow in the footsteps of Man v. Food’s Adam Richman wherever we went, and making sure we had Philly in Philly/New York strip in New York/Long Island Iced Tea on Long Island, and eating bologna without really understanding what it is, we dined at a farm-to-table restaurant in Washington, ate cheesesteaks and hoagies at a ball game in Philadelphia, and visited the legendary Katz’s Deli (of When Harry Met Sally fame) in NYC. Not to mention the piece of red velvet cheesecake at Junior’s Diner that defeated even Ash.