Haitian cooking

A family meal in Haiti is not necessarily taken together apart on special occasions (wedding, celebration, baptism ...), when the meal is served the person who served the meal draws the dish of each person and calls this one to come and get it back. After being served you go and eat at the place you want.

Haitian recipe

Haitian rice hummmm ... What a delight! Among Haitians, they call this recipe "diri ak pwa" (rice with red kidney beans). This rice is by far the kind that I prefer; it is so tasty that I sometimes eat it without side dishes. Haitians will tell you, rice "chèch" (or dry rice which means rice cooked with red kidney beans with no meat or fish).

Note that this recipe is undeniably a must for the Haitian people. I would even go so far as to say that a Haitian recipe site without the recipe on the picture above is not complete.

There are several kinds of Haitian preparation for rice with peas, rice can be done with a variety of different peas; the cooking process is mainly the same except for the cooking time of the different peas (depending on the type of pea, some will have to be boiled less or longer).

·         Rice with green peas, rice with peas of Lima, rice  with black peas, rice with red pea

Haitian vegetable recipe

The Haitian vegetable recipe is a traditional dish that is by far my favorite. Seriously, I could eat it every day without ever getting bored.

 I confess that at first glance, this pile of boiled and crushed vegetables looks more like a kind of "vegetable meal" not very beautiful to watch, but just take a bite before falling under its charm.

The taste of just seasoned vegetables, whether with beans and rice, white rice, boiled bananas, fried plantain bananas or even simple potatoes, makes this recipe one of the most versatile dishes in Haitian cuisine.

As the name suggests, vegetables are the basis of this recipe. Just like the "soup joumou"( pumpkin soup), one finds many ways to prepare the Haitian vegetables as it  is homemade cooking, but it remains nonetheless the cabbage and the eggplant remain the two essential basic elements in Haitian cooking.

Emmanuella F

After carnival comes Lent

After carnival, we have a forty-day period which is called Lent. During this time, people get closer to God by going to church and eating healthy food. It begins on Ash Wednesday, this year February 14th and ends on Holy Thursday, before the celebration of the Lord's supper. Lent refers in particular to the forty days spent in the desert by the people of Israel, between  their coming out of Egypt and entering the promised land; it also refers to the forty days Christ spent in the beginning of his public life. This number of forty symbolizes the time of preparation for a new beginning.

This time usually corresponds to the dry season in our tropical area which is also called "carême".

Agnès P

After Lent, a period of fast, penance and prayer comes Easter which is the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus. It is celebrated at church or during a family dinner. There are a lot of Easter eggs, decorations and gifts. In Martinique, we decorate eggs and hide them for children to find them during an egg hunt.

Lindsay A

Soon, we'll celebrate Easter and we'll eat crab "Matoutou" and rice. Matoutou is cooked in a colombo sauce. "Colombo" is stewed meat or fish cooked in a curry sauce with potatoes and carrots cut in dice. Whole families and friends spend the Easter Monday at the beach sipping and eating crab matoutou.

Aurélie M

Crab matoutou

Chicken colombo

We invite you to try our local recipes

A nice blog about Martinican traditions

Our eating habits

       After taking into account your message about your diet and how you behave at the table, we can say that in Martinique, we do not have a particular way of eating. We eat most often with the family on Sunday around a West Indian meal usually composed of plantains, yam, red kidney beans, with chicken, beef, mutton or codfish.

      At the table, we often talk about everything, about the week and we laugh at it telling one another" milans" which are gossips, attractive talk about small mishaps on even around neighbors, etc...

Aurélie B

      After carnival, comes Lent. Lent is a period of forty days, forty days of abstinence of alcohol, sex and many things people like.

      

      However, during Lent, there is something to respect especially on Fridays: we have to eat fish, a vegetable soup called 'soup Zabitan'. It is a green soup made of green leave vegetables like spinach. We also eat 'titiri' which is very tiny fish, crayfish, cod fritters, vegetarian pepper. On Good Friday, it is a tradition for us to eat only vegetables or shrimp fritters.

Noreen S-L

How to make cod fritters