This week we read the book Rice & Rocks written by Sandra L. Richards and illustrated by Megan Kayleigh Sullivan. Giovanni, the protagonist, is having friends over for Sunday dinner and is mortified his grandmother is making her traditional Jamaican rice and beans (or, as he calls it, “rice and rocks”). He ends up going on a magic flight around the world with his pet parrot, Jasper, and discovers that people all over enjoy rice and beans, including his friends’ families. Closer to home, Ms. Francis told us all about the Jamaican recipes she’s learned from her mother-in-law.
In the kitchen, the first graders made Jamaican rice and peas, seasoning the rice and kidney beans with garlic, freshly grated ginger, green onions, allspice berries, and bay leaves and fresh thyme from our school garden. The rice is cooked in coconut milk and traditionally prepared with a Scotch bonnet pepper, but we used the much milder Cherry Bomb pepper instead as a garnish for anyone who craved a little heat! The resulting dish was fragrant, faintly tropical, and deeply satisfying. We enjoyed the rice and peas with a refreshing iced sorrel (the Jamaican name for hibiscus) tea sweetened with agave syrup. Everyone loved the deep magenta color and we had a few tea converts in the class.
