The Start of Cooking with Morgan Freeman and Friends - Bermuda Bouillabaissse

This is the first post of my blog. I will be reporting on my experience with the recipes in "Cooking with Morgan Freeman and Friends". The challenge is I am not a great cook, but I can read reasonably well, am fearless around the kitchen, and hopefully, the recipes will pull me through. I will report on my wife's reaction to the results and comments from others who will be my tasters.

I readily admit that this was really the idea of my wife, Mayling, maybe something to keep me busy, off the golf course, and out of trouble until she retires next fall. Now that I have begun the blog, I am excited to get into the book, the recipes and writing about the experience. Before starting, a little background about how this started.

Mayling and I live in Nairobi, Kenya, and recently, in April 2010, we made a trip to the Virgin Islands, mainly to hone our sailing skills after about a 10 year absence from the water. We passed basic, cruising and bareboat courses offered through the American Sailing Association, using FairWinds Sailing School out of St. Thomas, USVI. We passed the courses and immediately afterwards, chartered a 34 foot Beneteau in Road Town BVI. We were hooked again.

Having owned two boats in the 1990's, a 27 foot Coronada sloop on the Chesapeake Bay and a nimble 22 foot French built weekender sloop on Lake Geneva. The two weeks of sailing was enough for us to form a vision of at least part of our retirement life. Since April, we have been researching and planning to buy our 3rd boat (the other two are long gone). We plan to live aboard and sale in the Caribbean for at least part of the year.

Following our charter with SunSail, and on leaving St. Thomas, we found this wonderful book and I am now starting to cook my way through from cover to cover. I hope to do every recipe during the next 7 months, prior to embarking on our new sailing adventures in the Caribbean. I hope those who encounter this blog will find it interesting and fun.

Bermuda Bouillabaisse

Today, I start with Bermuda Bouillabaisse (tough spelling), and I am now off to buy some lobster and garlic, the only two ingredients that I lack. We are lucky in that seafood is plentiful in Kenya as we get fresh everything from the Indian Ocean only a few hundred kilometers from Nairobi.