They saved Paradise!
ALTHOUGH they have never appeared together on screen, Bermuda-based Academy Award winner Michael Douglas and fellow Oscar recipient Morgan Freeman are co-starring in a new off-screen project — one aimed at alleviating widespread suffering in the hurricane-battered Caribbean island of Grenada.Freeman, a veteran yachtsman who spends his downtime between movie projects sailing his 43-foot Shannon ketch around the Caribbean and north to Bermuda, founded The Grenada Relief Fund (GRF) after Hurricane Ivan cut a swathe of destruction through the island in 2004 — and then set about press-ganging celebrity friends to help raise "boatloads of money" for the Spice Island.
Douglas is one of the high-profile contributors to Freeman's latest fund-raising project — the island-themed cookbook Morgan Freeman& Friends: Caribbean Cooking For A Cause.
Freeman — an Academy Award winner last year for his role in Million Dollar Baby — approached celebrities who either vacation in the Caribbean or who have family connections in the islands to contribute to the newly published book — with all proceeds going to the GRF. DOUGLAS, whose mother — the actress Diana Douglas — is Bermudian and whose grandfather Colonel Thomas Dill was Bermuda's Attorney General, has lived here full-time with actor wife Catherine Zeta-Jones and their two young children since 2002. The actor/ producer, who won his brace of Oscars for performing in Wall Street and producing 1975's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, eagerly contributed not only his name to Freeman's project but also the culinary expertise of Aqua, the restaurant at his family-owned South Shore resort Ariel Sands.
Last year Mr. Freeman visited the island with co-authors Wendy Wilkinson and Donna Lee and a photographic team to spend time at Ariel Sands deciding on the recipes included in the Bermuda chapter of the recently published cook book.
"We had been working on introducing more Bermudian dishes to our menu for a long time; we have been trying to bring Bermudian cooking into mainstream, high-end restaurant high-class cuisine," Claudio Vigilante, part owner of Aqua, Fresco's Restaurant and Wine Bar and Thai restaurant Silk told The Royal Gazette.
"Then we got a call from actor Morgan Freeman's publicist.
"Mr. Freeman was turning his sights to the culinary world with a book about the traditional dishes of the Caribbean. The book was being compiled to raise money for hurricane victims on the island of Grenada. "The book's production team loved (Aqua),"
Mr. Vigilante added. "They came down and took pictures. They were really excited by the whole thing. They also came to Fresco's for a photo-shoot.
"Mr. Freeman was great. He was very nice to deal with and very gracious. We have provided Bermuda recipes for the book which is great exposure for Bermuda, as well as for our restaurant."
Aqua head chef John Wason, a Barbadian, told the Gazette he had solicited both recipes and advice from Bermudian friends before adding his variations on local dishes to the restaurant's menu.
One of the traditional Bermudian dishes Mr. Wason has adapted for the restaurant is the humble Bermudian staple Johnny bread.
"When a customer comes in and is seated they are right away given our Johnny bread with olive oil and vinegar, sun dried tomatoes and jerk seasonings," said Mr. Vigilante. "We added these things to make it a little bit different."
There is also a rock fish dish with a yellow bird sauce, a gratin cassava dish, a loquat tart and a paw-paw and shrimp salad, among other Bermudian delicacies
Mr. Vigilante said aside from Freeman's interest in including Bermudian dishes in his book, tourists are increasingly looking for authentic local cuisine — and are often disappointed if they don't find it on the menu.
"We absolutely find that when tourists come in they are looking for authentic Bermudian food," Mr. Wason agreed. OTHER celebrity contributors to Morgan Freeman& Friends: Caribbean Cooking For A Cause include actor and dancer Ben Vereen, who talks about the Rastafarian movement's Ital cooking; CBS anchorwoman Katie Couric, who helped to provide recipes from her favourite Caribbean getaway spot, Anguilla; Grammy Award-winning singer Alicia Keys, who spotlights Jamaican cuisine ("I love the salt fish in Jamaica," she told the authors. "It's like no place else, just perfectly rich and savoury"); and Pirates of the Caribbean star Orlando Bloom, who has developed a taste for Dominican food since he began filming the popular ongoing film series on that Caribbean island in 2002.Freeman, who has also starred in such films as Driving Miss Daisy, Glory, Seven and The Shawshank Redemption, first sailed to Grenada — one of the southernmost islands in the Caribbean — in 1993.
He's been a regular visitor ever since.
"It's one of the loveliest places on earth," Freeman, 69, told celebrity magazine Hello! last month, shortly after the cookbook was published. "And the resiliency of the people is astounding."WITH the Caribbean now his second home — he moors his ketch in the British Virgin Islands and he and wife Myrna Colley-Lee have traditionally spent every December and January since the late 1980s island-hopping before returning to Hollywood — the GRF is Freeman's attempt to give something back to a part of the world that has given him so much enjoyment.And, as the actor points out in the introduction to a volume that is part recipe book, part island travelogue peppered with celebrity anecdotes and historical and cultural information about more than a dozen locations, there remains much to be done in Grenada even two years after the last hurricane hit.
On September 7, 2004, Hurricane Ivan slammed into Grenada, inflicting severe damage to the 132-square-mile island nation's social and economic infrastructures and to its environment.
When it was over, 28 people were dead, 353 hospitalised, and 90 per cent of the country's 31,122 houses were damaged or destroyed, leaving more than 30,000 people — an astonishing one-third of the population — homeless or living in desperate circumstances.
The private sector suffered enormous losses in office buildings, equipment and stock; and agriculture and tourism, the main earners of foreign exchange, were brought to a halt.
There was also unimaginable damage to the public use infrastructure and to the institutions and systems of governance; and widespread loss of livelihoods.
Just a year later Hurricane Emily sideswiped the island, causing additional havoc and setting back recovery efforts that began after Ivan.
More than 20,000 acres of agricultural land were destroyed by the two hurricanes, placing many farmers into the poverty line. The hurricanes also destroyed 90 per cent of all the crops on the island, including the vast majority of the nutmeg trees, which take nine to 12 years to mature.
Before the hurricanes hit, 33 per cent of the islands residents were living under the poverty line. After the hurricanes the level of poverty in Grenada increased exponentially.
Only five schools were left usable — 79 were destroyed or damaged beyond use. Freeman found The Grenada Relief Fund for the express purpose of helping the people of Grenada reclaim their lives by helping to build hurricane resistant homes, providing educational opportunities for new job skills, and helping farmers and foresters re-cultivate devastated farm lands.
"We've organised the book as I would plan a sailing trip," Freeman writes in the introduction, "making time for friends, for exquisite food and for the beauty and uniqueness of the many islands we visit."
The actor says while he has had a 20-year love affair with island fare, he is somewhat less than adept at preparing it in his yacht's galley ("Frequently, my wife Myrna and I eat on the boat where she is the cook — certainly not me!")
Cooking up a storm
