One of my favorite things about travel is food. Okay, one of my favorite things about life is food, but that’s a chapter for another day. Almost always, when you find places you love in the world, there’s some kind of food or drink unique to that experience and you find yourself thinking of it at the strangest times.
A couple weeks ago I was at a football game and amongst the brats and pizzas and turkey legs I thought to myself, you know what would be really good right now? Roti.
Roti is the word in many places around the world for certain kinds of bread. Often this bread is eaten alone but there are a lot of different combinations that, honestly, I never heard of until I started to write this. But the Roti I know, the Roti that haunts my dreams, is Chicken Roti, a West Indian creation most commonly found in the Carribbean islands.
So now that we know which Roti I’m talking about, and how I somehow equate it with heaven on a plate, we can see how it easily makes sense that I’d want to recreate this at home. I mean, who wouldn’t want to eat something that reminds you of slowly climbing out of a low beach chair after endless hours of doing nothing, only to drag yourself mere feet to the nearest beach bar, raise your sunglasses just high enough to make eye contact with the bartender and say “lunch?”
Yeah, see what I mean now?
So when I thought to make Roti (yes, I think I will continue to capitalize Roti forever) at home, I was of course, in the middle of the grocery store with only a sketchy list of ingredients in my mind. I knew I had some hot sauce I’d picked up on my last trip, but past that and the basic vegetable ingredients, I was lost.
Luckily, I had the Magic Phone and could go ahead and google for ingredients right then. I didn’t so much need an exact recipe as I did a reminder. This led me to click on the very first link that turned up in the Magic Phone Google search.
This worked fine as a reminder because I already had an idea in my head of what should be in MY Roti anyway.
I went home and almost immediately started. Because when you realize you want heaven on a plate, you realize you want heaven on a plate to start right now. (Dork movie reference alert!)
So, you have the potatoes…
And carrots…
And onions…
And peppers…
(Not pictured: Minced garlic.)
And you chop and chop and chop. Or you use something to chop everything with, like the Vidalia Chopper. I warn you, clicking on that link will about annoy you to death. But it really does make chopping so easy. Yes, I know how much of a dork that makes me but, honestly, in a dish like this I really don’t see what difference chopping makes, as long as it all ends up chopped.
Anyway, then I cooked the chicken. And I don’t know if anyone remembers, but I really don’t like cooking meat and even more, I don’t like taking pictures of it. So here’s the chicken cooking:
I used a whole chicken breast (as in both sides of the breast) and had the butcher split and butterfly them. I cooked them that way, but I suppose you could chop it yourself and then cook. That is, if you can possibly stand handling uncooked chicken like that. I guess what I’m saying is, you could totally make this vegetarian and likely not miss a thing.
Soon enough, though, the chicken is cooked and I can chop it all civilized-like (read: no freaking out). I used Canola oil to cook, turned the pieces several times, and kept the pan covered so it would stay moist. Flavor wasn’t really a priority at this point because that comes later.
This (and I would assume most) Roti recipes call for broth or some type of stock. It was only when I got home that I realized I had neither, so I mixed half a package of onion soup with water and that seemed to work fine. I’ve also always had Roti with chickpeas, so I made sure to add some of those, too.
After the chicken was chopped, I began to add all the vegetables along with the broth (soup) and the hot sauce into the pan to cook. I’ve noticed some recipes want you to cook the onions and peppers with the chicken but for as long as everything was in the pan, they turned out fine.
I also blanched the potatoes first, because I had a fear of sitting down to eat this and everything being perfect except the potatoes. I did not want nearly raw potatoes in my otherwise wonderful heaven-on-a-plate creation.
So after everything was simmering together, I added the curry powder. I’m not sure why I waited until this point other than I was doing whatever I wanted and that seemed like the right time.
I also added salt and pepper, which isn’t important but oooooh, loooook, you can see the pepper!
And it actually did seem to make a difference in taste, that salt and pepper. Go figure.
Wow, this is turning into the longest post about Roti there ever was. In fact, I bet it IS the longest post about Roti there ever was.
The most “fun” part of Roti, though, and why it makes a great beach food, is that you wrap all this up in a tortilla or a Roti bread, and THEN eat it.
Well, all I had were sprouted wheat whole grain wraps which, while having their merits, are honestly no where near the best choice for Roti. So, when I tried to wrap mine, it did not work.
In theory, it should look something like this:
But mine looked something like this:
But luckily the Roti and I are very much alike in that we don’t need to look good to be friggin’ fantastic, and it was. It really, really was.
It was so good, in fact, I almost felt like I was having the real thing.
Except, you know, there was no beach and no bartender and I had to clean up the mess.
If you’d like other recipes, check out this one on the Food Network (way too many ingredients for me), or this one, which also has a recipe for Roti bread.
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