From the Editor…

Sue and Denning Wells contribute a firehall food article and recipe for Jerk Chicken this issue with a fun backstory.

I ate a lot of Jerk Chicken in the firehall – always with black bean rice drizzled with the gravy from the cooking. Their article made me recall a related fun story.

In my hall, we typically bought (not brought) lunch, and made dinner. When you're taking a fire truck to buy lunch, you tend to stay close to the station. We had at least four good Caribbean take-out restaurants near our station – one of them was very good.
That's where we went most to buy Jerk Chicken. It was owned by an elderly woman. It's the only one of the four restaurants that's not there now – she moved hers to a different community, which, now that I think about it, probably explains why we wanted the recipe.

Well, as a firefighter I once knew used to say, asking is for free. So one time, one of the firefighters from our hall just asked this woman if she would share her recipe so we could make her Jerk Chicken for dinner at the firehall.

Perhaps knowing that she might lose a little business giving out the secret, or perhaps just because a couple of young firefighters looked like good targets for a laugh, she said yes, on one condition. On weekends, she had a (rather large) food booth at the (very busy) local flea market – she would teach them how to prepare and make it, but they had to learn while working at the booth for a day on a busy weekend. And that's what they did. They got a great recipe and a great experience, and we got delicious Jerk Chicken…every week!

Maybe she only moved the restaurant. Maybe she still lives near the hall. Denning's hall is close to the hall I worked out of at that time. Reading Denning and Sue's article raised an interesting question: What if it's the same woman?

I wish I still ate chicken.