Rumtastic

Karen’s new husband, Wayne, is from the US Virgin Islands, which is the main reason why the wedding was on St. John. His mother, Cristobel, who still lives there, cooked us up the most amazing feast the night after the wedding. There was curried goat, spicy boiled fish, homemade hot sauce that made Scott cry tears of pain, stewed chicken, barbeque chicken, stir-fried chicken, pigs foot stew, roast ham, baked cheese and macaroni, potato salad, spicy mashed yams with tomato paste, fried plantains, and deviled eggs ALL IN ONE MEAL! And, to cap the whole thing off, she presented five black cakes (dense fruit cake soaked in rum), six coconut tarts (yeehaw!), and uncountable loaves of sweet bread. Each dessert was amazing on its own, but together they were a cornucopia of delicious. She sent us home with one entire cake of each type. They are in my freezer, but I plan on reliving the dream when I return to Boston in a week. If only I had snagged some leftover stewed chicken…

Oh wait, I almost forgot to mention the amazing pineapple rum cakes we bought at the gift shop. They were so good that Scott and I stuffed one in our mouths before we caught up with the rest of his family. It was like crack. Once the word got out, one family member after another would secret off and purchase one, tearing into it before he or she hit the door on the way out of the shop. The islanders made a lot of money off of us this weekend, on rum cake alone.

In the airport, on the way back, we saw a girl who had a bag of about a dozen of these little rum cakes. We told her we were going to mug her, but she said that she was having such a bad day that she would probably be able to put up a pretty good fight. Apparently, she got stopped by security and hassled and missed her flight because of it. She was pretty distraught. After a brief conversation, she shocked us by offering us one of the chocolate rum cakes as a gift. It seemed like too generous of a gift (we knew they were precious and must be like gold off the island), but she insisted. She said that the only way her day could get better was if she knew she had done something nice for someone. I thought that was a pretty classy technique for curing the blues, one worth trying the future.

[Image from: http://www.tortugarums.com/]

PS. The other thing I like about the Caribbean: you can have a pina colada at every meal!