In the Spirit of St. Lucia

After our trip in November to St. Lucia, we came back with a renewed appreciation for different bananas. As it turns out, St. Lucia grows a different banana than we Americans are used to. It's small, and sweet, and they sell it primarily to the U.K. But since they grow bananas there, lots of their food incorporates bananas in ways I'd never before tasted.

In various different dishes, both plantains and green bananas provided the starch part of the meal. Sometimes the banana was cooked with cabbage, other times with fish. A month later, we had an urge to bring some of this back into our meals, so we created today's dish in the spirit of St. Lucia.

Party Sausage Bites

Back on Halloween, Mike and I wanted to make some sort of yummy but easy appetizer to bring to a party. We knew we wanted to do something with sausage. A local grocery had snagged us with an offer of free sauerkraut with the purchase of two packs of kielbasa. So, we developed this recipe. We were so happy with the finished dish that we can't make to prepare this again and bring it to another get-together.

Deep Dish Pizza

Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, my family would often get a yummy treat from Lou Malniti's. After learning to cook during my time at college, I decided to expand my horizons from mostly stir-fry to include some baking. At first I tried to bake this one at a time on our gas grill. It's possible, and I'll talk about it a bit below. But I eventually settled on waiting for the cool of autumn, or the chill of winter, and baking two of these at a time in the oven.