Local lunch and ground provisions
16th Feb 2018
When we went to Castries a few weeks back we had a “local
lunch” from a stall in the market area.
The lunch was advertised as being the meat of your choice with rice,
lentils, salad, mac and cheese and “ground provisions”. When it arrived, there were some plantains,
what appeared to be sweet potato and a couple of other starchy, slightly
unpleasant tasting lumps. These we took
to be the aforementioned “ground provisions”.
We pictured some vegetable that had been dried, ground and
re-constituted into the items that appeared on our plates. Today, we found lunch at a cafe in Laborie
(took the local bus to get there). The
waitress at the cafe offered us a lunch of either fish (it being Friday and
Lent) or chicken with rice, lentils, mac and cheese, steamed vegetables and
ground provisions. Knowing that we
hadn’t enjoyed this too much previously, I wondered what had been ground up to
make the “provisions”. Laborie is a
progressive village and has open wifi all around (at least where we were). So I searched the web for ‘provisions as in
food’. I nearly burst out laughing. “Ground provisions” is a term used in the
West Indies for foods such as yam, sweet potato, cassava and some other root
veg (whose name I’ve forgotten). It’s
not ground as in milled or minced but ground as in the earth! Boy do I feel stupid! I think it’s the cassava and the other thing
that we don’t find so delightful. One
could probably substitute the phrase ‘ground provisions’ with ‘root vegetables’. There’s something much more charming about
the thought of ‘food provided by the ground’.
Laborie is a fishing village with a really nice dock and a
mix of older and newer buildings. It was
colorful and attractive (in a way that Vieux Fort is not). The streets seemed quiet. We walked along the main (?) street passing
the public library(closed) and a few bar/restaurants. At the far end of the village was the
church. We went in and sat in a pew. The windows and doors were open and a lovely
breeze was sweeping through. After our
lunch we looked around the center of town a bit more and then caught a bus back
to Vieux Fort.
The beach at Laborie
The Catholic Church Laborie
Pink Boat Laborie
Buildings Laborie
Buildings Laborie
I went to this place in first time with my husband on Tuesday night after work. The inside of the Los Angeles venues was quite big and had enough seats to sit and nice bar area. We had a few things, along with drinks and it was all good!
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