Where Northern Europe meets the Southern Caribbean
by Barbara Barton Sloane
“Blanch your plantains!” our instructor
commands in a no-foolin’-around voice. Blanch? “What does blanch mean?”
I furtively whisper to Julia, my partner in this off-the-wall adventure. You
see, we were cooking for our supper in Angelica’s Kitchen where our
group of intrepid travelers has come for a lesson in traditional cuisine.
Having already had a rather lengthy lesson in the art of knife-handling, and
inhaling the ambrosial aromas wafting forth from boiling cauldrons, we looked
forward to an evening that would end in a memory-making meal or – at the very
least- an edible one.
A group of us, journalists all, are
visiting Curacao, an island rich in history. Settled by natives of South
America, in 1499 the Spanish arrived and, in 1634, the Dutch defeated them to
stake their claim to the island. It is the largest and most populous of the
three ABC islands of the Lesser Antilles: Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao. It is
under 3 hours flight time from Miami and a mere 35 miles north of Venezuela.
(to be continued)