Publisher's Synopsis
Caribbean Cooking Made Simple is a cookbook / memoir containing 125 recipes from 17 Caribbean islands. But, the book is more than a cookbook that showcases meals and beverages of the Caribbean. It tells the story of how Pat Lovelace created a menu to satisfy the sophisticated tastes of guests visiting Pat and Guy's upscale boutique hotel. The book also chronicles her experiences on the islands where she collected the recipes. Pat and her husband built The Windmills Plantation on the remote island of Salt Cay in the Turks and Caicos in the 1980"s. This was well before those islands became a prime tourist destination that they are today. The island government sold the land for the project to Pat and her husband Guy contingent upon their using only local help to build and operate the hotel. Pat's kitchen staff was therefore selected from local women who had no culinary experience other than cooking simple island meals in their homes. The task was further complicated by the fact that all food items other than conch, lobster, grouper and hog snapper had to be flown from the US to the island of Grand Turk, clear customs there and then be loaded onto a small plane for transport to Salt Cay. After which it would be trucked to the hotel. All of the above was subject to inevitable island delays and mess ups. Fresh and frozen foods did not survive the ordeal. Pat was limited to canned food and vegetables that could be stored without refrigeration. She was able to use only a few frozen items that she could carry in cooler boxes with her luggage on her monthly buying trips to Miami. Using recipes she collected while visiting 32 Caribbean islands with her resort architect husband she created her Tour of the Caribbean menu. The menu took a culinary journey to a different Caribbean island for lunch and dinner every day. The recipes had to be simple enough for her staff to understand and execute. The positive guest reaction from Pat's culinary tour de force is documented in hundreds of letters of praise from her guests and their requests to food magazines for recipes.
