I gave up bread -- not bread fruit

Steamed bread fruit from Jamaica has a pleasant, dough-like consistency.

In Jamaica last weekend, I made sure to order my favorite dish -- a breakfast of ackee and salt fish.

Unfortunately, the highly acclaimed kitchen at Round Hill Hotel & Villas was unable to serve us two of the traditional accompaniments -- boiled green bananas and bread fruit.

It's one or the other, so today at home, I enjoyed steamed bread fruit with breakfast. Next week, I'll have soft, boiled green bananas that mash easily under my fork.  

At Round Hill, ackee and salt fish are served without boiled green bananas.

With green bananas or bread fruit, the dish is a winning combination of flavors and textures: bland, soft ackee; salty dried cod or pollock; and sweet and hot peppers.

Bread fruit is baked first, then sliced and roasted, fried or steamed.

I gave up bread and pizza to lose weight, but enjoy an occasional breakfast of ackee, salt fish and unusual bread fruit.

Our garden is yielding tomatoes and hot peppers, above, and black figs, below.

Late-summer harvest

At the traditional end of summer, we're enjoying tomatoes, green and hot peppers, cucumbers and black figs from our garden.

I like the figs with cheese, such as shavings of Parmigiano Reggiano from Italy or slices of Manchego from Spain.

We haven't had too much success with okra plants, but the flower is gorgeous.

The flower of an okra plant.

If okra are allowed to grow too large, they become tough and fibrous.

We've started to get a lot of tomatoes, and we also have tomatoes I bought at Fairway Market in Paramus.

So I've started to add tomatoes to omelets and frittatas, and plan to buy fresh mozzarella cheese to have with them.

A frittata with Campari tomatoes, cheese and dried Italian herbs.

Campari tomato halves added to a simple egg-white omelet.

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Food gifts from Jamaica

My wife returned from the island of Jamaica late Friday night, bearing gifts of food.

Most prominent were two bags of 100% Jamaica Blue Mountain roasted coffee beans she bought in the Wallenford Blue shop at the Montego Bay airport. These bags have shrunk to three-quarters of a pound, but at $19 each, they are a great buy when compared to nearly $40 for one pound of Blue Mountain coffee beans at Fairway Market in Paramus. (Photo: Three Finger Falls in the Blue Mountains.)

This morning, my wife served steamed bread fruit she had baked in Jamaica and put in her luggage, along with four or five small fish she bought from the fishermen at Harvey Beach, seasoned, dipped in flour and fried (I visited their shacks during my August vacation on the island). Jamaicans who live in the U.S. say they can't find fish that tastes as good as the ones back home.

But the one thing she could not find was fresh ackee, that odd Jamaican fruit that serves as a foil to salted cod and hot peppers in what many call the Jamaican national dish: ackee and saltfish (photo, with fried dumplings). So we had that for breakfast, using canned ackee in brine from Hackensack Market.