Manchester Caribbean Carnival 2010

Last weekend we had the annual Caribbean Carnival in Manchester. The event was held at a local park (Aleandra Park) and there were a lot of cultural events as well as contemporary shows featuring local hip hop and r&b artistes.

However, as this is a food blog, I will just report on this event from a culinary point of view.

There were a lot of stalls there with traders selling their wares with a caribbean theme. However, every third stall is one selling food and they were almost all selling the same dishes. By far, the most popular is Jerk Chicken - barbequed chicken marinated with jerk (jamaican herbs and spices) seasoning.

Here are a couple of pics from a stall.
Also watch the video link above to see what the event looked like.




We did not stay long but managed to bring home a couple of delicious treats.

Jerk Chicken with rice and salad. Not heavily flavoured but very nice!



Jamaican Curried Goat. Also very nice ... the closest comparison I can think of is Yeo's canned curry beef ... similar but nicer!

A Chinese Christmas in the UK

I think it is customary all over the western world that Chinese restaurants lay on special Christmas banquet menus adapted for the local taste. It is a bit late, but this was what we had when I went out with my office last Christmas (2009). I would say that this is a rather typical menu in most Chinese restaurants in the UK catering for the local people.

We had a regular and a vegetarian banquet at this (lol, honest!) restaurant in Manchester.

Starting with this Chicken and Sweetcorn soup




We also had this vegetarian sweetcorn soup, which tasted almost identical to the previous one, but with veg bits instead of chicken.


Then onto this mixed vegetarian starter - apart from the salad, spring rolls and gluten I do not know what the rest were, but they were quite nice.


This was the meat starter, consisting of some popular dim sum bites like har gau, siu mai, fried wonton, spring rolls and curry samosa (is this Chinese??).


Then onto the crisy shredded duck wraped in pancake rolls. Very nice but very typical of most western Chinese banquets








The vegetarians had this nut and veg stir fry to be wrapped in lettuce leaf instead. It was very tasty but I much prefer the duck.


This first main course was beef stir fried in a very sweet tangy sauce .. I think its OK sauce. My favourite dish of the evening.


SOme mixed veg dish for the veggies


And another! Both were ok but tasted very similar.



Chicken satay (not Malaysian satay sauce, but Jimmy's Sate sauce like this). Very nice tasted like it had citrus juice in it, which I have since started using it myself too.


And a rather generic chicken and mixed veg stir fry which was ok only.


Side dish was young chow fried rice. Nice but not exceptional. The veggies had just egg fried rice.


Overall a satisfying banquet and we got exactly what we expected.