I have always maintained that travel is important, especially when the bulk of one’s life has been spent on a tiny Island in the Caribbean. Visiting different countries is educational in many ways, and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to do so. It’s always interesting to observe cultures we have never been exposed to, and experience non-tropical climates, but in my case dining at restaurants other than my own was where I learned the most! I would eat a particular meal and think, “I could make this better on Bequia!”, mentally noting the different taste sensations so that I could tweak and replicate the dish at Mac’s Pizzeria. Travel definitely recharged my batteries, I always returned home rested and full of new ideas to experiment with in the kitchen.
The first time my husband Nik ordered a quesadilla at a restaurant in Canada it was love at first bite, and he told me they would be a good addition to the Pizzeria’s menu. I myself wasn’t overly fond of quesadillas but knew he was right, a lot of people seemed to enjoy them, and that was always the deciding factor for me. That particular summer I ate several different quesadillas in order to familiarize my taste buds to something new, and returned to Bequia eager to give them a try.
It didn’t take me long to realize that the store-bought tortillas available in St. Vincent were unsatisfactory; they were too perfectly round, had the consistency of cardboard and tasted totally bland. Therefore, the first step in creating quesadillas for the pizzeria entailed learning how to make home-made tortillas. This wasn’t difficult once I realized they were a bit similar to making roti except easier, and after a few trial runs we were turning out light, tasty tortillas. The dough was quite simple to make; I combined flour, salt and baking powder with a bit of oil, then briefly kneaded the mixture. After letting the dough relax for a bit it was divided into smaller balls, then rolled into circles and lightly fried on each side.
With the recipe for the tortillas perfected, I moved on to assembling the quesadillas. I sauteed onions, garlic and sweet peppers, then proceeded to build the popular Mexican treats. I sprinkled a tortilla with a bit of cheese and some of the onion mixture, then added chicken, beef or whatever else Nik (my willing guinea pig!) fancied. After topping the creation with more cheese, it was covered with another tortilla and slipped into a pizza oven for baking. The end results were pretty good thanks to the home-made tortillas, they were SO much better than the imported ones! I decided that the quesadillas were ready to be posted on the Pizzeria’s daily special menu, I just had to figure out what to serve them with.
Most of the quesadillas I had eaten abroad had been served with sour cream as well as guacamole, and both garnishes presented a challenge on Bequia when it came to availability and cost efficiency. Sour cream wasn’t always stocked in the stores and was also quite pricey, and the fresh avocados needed for guacamole were very seasonal. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could make and freeze guacamole as long as I squeezed fresh lime juice into the mixture. Freshly made guacamole would have been preferable of course, but the frozen variety worked just fine. Once I realized that people were happy with the guacamole I stopped fretting over the cost and availability of sour cream, it really wasn’t necessary as a garnish to what had quickly become a popular addition to the Pizzeria’s menu. To those who wondered aloud why I would put something as non-local as quesadillas on the menu, I offered Mac’s reply when I had queried the sanity of opening a pizzeria on Bequia in the first place. I had poohed-poohed his “pie in the sky” notion of such a plan, noting that tourists would want to eat local food, not pizza. Mac’s response back then (which had seemed crazy) was that if he put lobster on his pizzas the tourists would love it. Mac was right about the lobster pizza, and the tourists loved my lobster quesadillas too!
