Tropical Vacation Cooking Reset
A long time coming
Issue 10: From Sara Kate’s kitchen
I just got back from the Dominican Republic where my daughter and I spent six days on what I thought would simply be an overdue relaxing trip of soaking in the sun and dipping in the sea, but ended up being incredibly healing in many ways.
We’d been on one other vacation since lockdown, to Montreal over the December holiday. I brought back a nasty case of Covid; just when things had started feeling a little more expansive, I went back inside, hit hard with isolation. Plus I was actually sick, and the recovery was long. So this trip was some soul medicine for sure. What I didn’t expect was how it reset my connection to flavor and cooking.
Covid aside, Dana and I have been hard at work on our cookbook that comes out next fall, so for the past months it’s been a set collection of recipes on repeat: develop, test, edit, test again, edit again… very little magic happening in the kitchen. Sometimes work is like that, but I didn’t realize how hungry I was to express myself, to receive others’ cooking, and to bathe myself in flavors that felt so foreign after two and a half years of being stuck in New York. The DR did that for me.
As you might have gathered from my last post, I often travel with my sourdough starter, but this time I just put yeast on the shopping list so we could have bread in our rental. After landing, we hustled through a local market and prideful of my Spanish, I quickly pulled the “levadura” off the shelf with some flour plus a few breakfast essentials like yogurt, butter, and eggs. The next morning when I woke up to start baking bread, I opened the levadura envelope and found a fine white powder. Baking soda! [Head smack.]
So instead, I winged it and made up this cake (no loaf pan, so I increased the batter by 50% and made it in a casserole) using what I had on hand plus the sugar I found in the cabinet and some center-piece limes our hosts left. We toasted it for breakfast, nibbled it for snacks, and closed our dinners with it. It was the perfect companion on our counter the whole week. The recipe is below.