Caribbean Thanksgiving Twists

Oh my goodness, you can feel the energy. By the way, maybe you should go try out for the Wizards as well. I saw those basketball moves. There you go. All right, well, we're here in the Good Day Cafe and you can put a Caribbean twist on your Thanksgiving feast. Sounds kind of fun, right? We've got Chef Lovely here to show us how to make a three pepper Jamaican jerk meatball. A good option for vegan people out there as well. Glad to have you here with us, Chef Lovely. Thank you. Thanks for having me. And so you were telling me in the commercial break, you're a PG County native, Prince George's County native. You had been out on the west coast for several years and now here you are back in our area. Yes I am. I'm back here in the DMV in Baltimore area after being in LA for eight years. So trying to reintroduce myself to my family, my friends, my hometown. Awesome. Well we're glad to have you here and you had a cafe out back in LA. Yes. Where you had a lot of these featured recipes that you're showing us today. Talk to us a little bit about first your cafe, your Food that you make, and really the premise of it all, the background for it, because you're kind of blending two different tastes here. Absolutely, yes. So, my favorite cuisine is West Indian Caribbean food, period. So, growing up, I learned a way to combine Americanized cultured favorites, our Thanksgiving staples and things that we eat all the time, with the spices, the flavors, just the feeling and the... Overall culture behind it from west indian caribbean vibes. So in la we had things on the menu like our ginger candy yams Our three pepper jerk meatballs rice and peas. We also have our Caramel pecan banana pudding, which is our americanized take on things so Sounds delicious. Just a way to blend them all. Fantastic. So you brought a few of the options for us to try here. What are we going to make with these meatballs? So today we're going to make a three-pepper jerk meatball. So this is the easiest way to do it besides making your jerk sauce from scratch, which you can do at home with your scallions, your green onions, your garlic. Like, um... Your scotch bonnet peppers and things like that, but today we're going to do the quick version. So we have a mixture of your favorite barbecue sauce mixed in here with a Walker's Wood smoky jerk pan barbecue sauce. Okay. We're going to mix them together, and we have already did that in this bowl right here. Add some of these peppers to the meatballs. Okay. So you can do that there. Alrighty. I love some peppers. Yeah, some tri-colored peppers brings a lot of vibrancy to it. And in those meatballs, we have some dry Jamaican jerk seasoning. Okay. Yeah, I was going to ask what's in the meatballs there. That's filled with allspice. We have some garlic. We have some thyme, rosemary, pimento, all of those. But no meat. No meat. Yes. No meat. It's like the meatball. Exactly. These are made from seitan. And a wheat substitute. Oh, interesting. Exactly. So you just take that and add the barbecue sauce to it. All right. I love a good sauce on here. So I'm going to douse them in some barbecue sauce. So this is what you would do at home. Okay. But here we have it. Prepped and ready to go. Ah, and a cute little crock pot. I know. So you can just dig on in and taste it. Oh, that smells really good, too. All right. Let me get one I try. I don't want to put the whole meatball in my mouth because we still got to talk a little bit. But it smells fantastic. Let me give it a taste. And while I try this, tell folks at home as well about the yams you brought. And that looks like some mac and cheese, some Thanksgiving staples. Exactly. Our Thanksgiving staples are... Baked macaroni and cheese and our ginger candy yams are literally one of our biggest sellers. When we had our cafe, people loved the variation of being able to still have that creamy filled texture baked macaroni without having dairy behind it and having something different and a little spice in there. Candy yams, because not many people have had ginger candy yams before. Okay, I'm definitely going to try that. This meatball is fantastic. I love the spice, the kick, like you mentioned. You really feel it, but it's not overwhelming. It's not. And it's still a little sweet. It does. You get the sweetness from the barbecue, the molasses, and the brown sugar in the barbecue sauce, and pair it with the coconut and the candy yams. It's like a perfect pair. Oh, delicious. Okay, so you're back here in the DMV. What's next for you moving ahead? Where can people reach out to you as well? So you can find me on Instagram at lovelyduo. You can also find me on our website at lovely-duo.com. Okay. I'm also on TikTok, Facebook, and you can find our Google page online as well. I've got to know where to find me. And this recipe, too, as well, because it's delicious. Exactly. So, fun fact, we will be having a cookbook launching soon. Oh, awesome. Give me about until January. Still putting the tweaks and the last thing finishes on it, but it's coming. Awesome. So you can get all of these same flavors in your house. Well, Chef Lovely, thank you so much. This is very lovely. We appreciate you coming in for us. Thank you. And hopefully you get to open a cafe here in the DMV sometime soon as well. We would love that for you. Thank you so much. Yeah. All right. We will be right back with more of Good Day after a quick break.