Hey crew, and welcome back to Cool Beans! Marie Mitchell’s new cookbook, Kin: Caribbean Recipes for the Modern Kitchen, is a love letter to her Caribbean identity. The South London–born daughter of Jamaican parents, Mitchell wanted to introduce readers to the region’s varied culture and cuisine, noting that folks may be surprised by what they learn. “A lot of people associate it with meat because they think of jerk: chicken and pork dishes on a grill with the seasoning, smoked over hot coals,” she says. “There’s so much that is actually vegetarian or vegan. It’s just embedded in the cuisine.” For instance, the Ital-based diet of Rastafarians is derived purely from plants.
The peppered tofu she makes On Repeat, though, is actually a riff on the popular Jamaican street food peppered shrimp. “I love tofu, and I often put this dish on menus because people who haven’t had much exposure to it eat it and they’re converted,” she says.
Why I love it
“It’s something that can come together very quickly—it doesn’t require lots of time—but it really delivers in flavor and the pure enjoyment of the food.
“I created this sauce that’s really sticky and gets into every element of the tofu, which is delicious. There’s something about it: You get sweetness, then you’ve got tartness from vinegar, earthiness from paprika, and delicious spiciness from Scotch bonnet [peppers].”
What I’ve changed
“If you’re not able to get hold of Scotch bonnets, you can use different chiles. A very close cousin is the habañero; it will present a slightly different flavor, because you won’t have that floral sweetness, but you can still get most of the flavor profile and the majority of that energy in this dish.
“I love having this as a snack, a smaller plate, or at the beginning of a meal as a starter, but what’s beautiful about this dish is that you can double the amount so it’s a more substantial meal. I love having it with plain basmati rice and pickles, or you could alternatively have this with Caribbean hard dough bread. Make sure you mop up the sticky sauce with whatever you’re eating with it.”
What else I’m into right now
- No scrap left behind. I try to use up odds and ends to make sauces and stocks. Recently I had some jarred red peppers and a whole load of pine nuts and some really good olive oil, so I made a pesto I knew my daughter would love. Also, I’m trying to use everything to their maximum value at the moment, so cuttings, peelings—as much as I can I’m freezing them and building that up and then making a vegetable stock.
- Freezer to the rescue. I have to say, the freezer is probably one of your greatest gifts when it comes to not wasting because, for example, sometimes you’ll make a pasta sauce that was enough to feed maybe six or seven, and we don’t need to eat six or seven portions. So I freeze them in cubes, and I pop them in Tupperware. And then I know I’ve got that in the bank, and when we want to cook dinner I’ve got access to it.
- Refrigerator upgrade. I recently got a bigger fridge, because I was finding that we were losing things in ours because it was so small I couldn’t see everything. So now I’m making sure that I’m using stuff up in the order that it needs to be used up, and planning meals around what needs to be used.