Haitian Supper Club

I'm a little late in getting this posted, but a few weeks ago we hosted our January Supper Club. If you are not familiar with a Supper Club, (until a few months ago, the only Supper Clubs I was familiar with are the restaurants back in Wisconsin with the best fish fry Fridays ever!) the one I'm referring to now is when a group of couples who get together monthly and each take turns hosting and coming up with a theme country or type of cuisine for the night. Each couple is responsible for making a part of the meal. In October our theme was East Indian, November was Irish. January was our turn to host, so I came up with a menu from the Haitian cookbook Tom had bought for me on his Dec 2007 trip to visit Stevenson.


Thanks to our dear friends Tammy and Brandon and Ray and Lisa for getting this all started - we have been having a blast with it each month! Here we are getting ready to dig in.....


Our menu consisted of: Beef Ragout (a stew-type dish with beef, potatoes, carrots, onions, plantains, vinegar, garlic, tomato paste, dumplings and a few other things), Yam Puree, Avocado salad with Peekleez ("pickles" a type of condiment made with white cabbage, carrots, shallots, onions, various hot peppers, sugar cane vinegar and garlic) and Dumplings with melted butter and cheese. We had two cocktails made with the Haitian rum we bought while visiting in December 2008 - it is supposed to be some of the best in the world - who knew?! We had "Colonial Punch" and "Zombie Cocktails". And for dessert, we had Pin Patat (Sweet Potato pudding) with Rum Raisin Sauce.

Part of our challenge this time around was to find the ingredients the recipes called for and also to decipher the measurements (or lack thereof) in the recipes. All in all, we must have done ok because everything was delicious! We had so much fun as we ate to some Caribbean music, made a toast to our sweet boy and his sooner rather than later coming home and then we retired to the living room to do a little Wii bowling and skiing! That's a whole other story! I probably won't be posting any pictures of that......