Week 6 - Jamaican

The last time the 52 week cooking challenge came up with the Jamaican theme was back in 2014, the first year I participated. I was so excited for it and made jerk chicken with rice and peas. We still went out for Jamaican food a fair amount at that time, and our conclusion was that, while we were glad we tried to make it ourselves, it was easier and tastier to just continue to go out for professionally-made jerk chicken. Since I didn't want to repeat that experiment or make jerk anything again for this challenge, I decided to try something different and make a black eyed pea curry based on a recipe I found on The Curious Chickpea.

The ingredients for our adapted recipe were:

- 1 yellow onion, chopped ($0.40)
- 6 cloves of garlic, minced ($0.33)
- 1 lb of mini yellow potatoes, peeled and chopped ($3.49)
- 2 cans of black eyed peas, drained and rinsed ($2.78)
- grapeseed oil for sautéing ($0.25)
- a couple tsp of dried thyme ($0.20)
- 2.5 tbsp of mild Jamaican curry powder ($1.70)
- salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste ($0.05)
- 1 can of coconut milk ($1.50)

The recipe called for 1 cup of coconut milk, but I used the entire can, (a) figuring that would dull the heat a little more for B, (b) because I never know what to do with the remaining coconut milk and it always ends up in the trash, and (c) because this current coconut milk we have doesn't mix in the can no matter how much you try to shake it or stir it, so you almost have to use the whole thing. The recipe also included 1/4 cup of lime juice at the end, which I had been expecting to do (it's even in the ingredients photo!), but by the time the food was ready, everyone was so hungry and I was in such a rush that I just forgot. Oops.

Anyway, we made plain brown rice alongside this, as well as some garlic zucchini, so the total for the recipe was $15.70 ($10.70 for the curry, $2 for the rice, and $3 for the zucchini, all approximate amounts). Considering the meal was vegan, I was expecting the final cost to be less than this, instead of more than the rice challenge we did for week 5 that included chicken sausage and cheese. It did make a lot of food though, and we had enough curry left over for other meals, but I still thought it would be far less.


The steps for making the curry were:

- prepare rice so that it's done when curry is finished
- prep (onions, garlic, potatoes)
- add oil to pot over medium heat, and add onion and garlic, cooking until soft
- add thyme, curry powder, salt, and pepper, and stir to coat, cook until fragrant (not long)
- add potatoes and cook for another minute or so (ours got a little dry here so I added a little bit more oil. Even though I don't really like doing that in the middle of the cooking process, I didn't want everything to burn)
- add black eyed peas and 2 cups of water
- partially cover, bring to simmer and cook until potatoes are tender
- remove cover and add coconut milk
- cook with lid off until liquid reduces
- remove from heat and add lime juice and salt to taste (forgot to do this...)


Overall, we thought the curry was okay. The curry powder we got had a decent amount of heat in it considering that cayenne was the last ingredient, but despite all the spices listed, didn't have as much flavor as I was expecting, even before the coconut milk. (Another strange thing was that, even though the curry flavors themselves seemed a little dulled after the coconut milk, the underlying heat still persisted a little bit, which was not what we wanted for B.) The final product, other than that mild underlying heat, turned out a little bit bland, maybe from using the whole can of coconut milk, but even if we had used less, I still don't know how much we would have liked it. It still wouldn't have been as good as any of the curry we've gotten out at restaurants, which may be part of our problem, the fact that we've had excellent Jamaican food over the years and that's our basis for comparison. No matter the recipe, I'm not sure anything coming out of our kitchen is going to compare to some of that deliciousness. We probably wouldn't make this again, but we're going to have to figure out something else to do with that curry powder in the future, since it wasn't cheap!