Carolyn Pledge Amaral was never allowed to barbecue ribs at home.

When her husband Frank burned them, she chewed him out — in front of everyone.

The argument became legendary.

Their friends now say, “Sure, we’ll come over to eat, as long as Frank doesn’t burn the ribs”.

Only fitting then that Don’t Burn the Ribs is the name of Carolyn’s cooking blog which contains her recipes and funny stories.

“I am originally from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia,” she said. “I married a Bermudian, Frank, 30 years ago. I am not a professional chef or anything, but I come from a family that loves to cook. I always thought I could cook until I met my mother-in-law, Maria Amaral. She is now 79 and not so well, but she was a wonderful cook. She taught me more about cooking than anyone else.”

The 50-year-old said her mother-in-law would find a way to work chouriço into almost any meal.

The chicken sliders recipe she was working on when we visited was based on a lunch that Maria frequently made for her family.

“I’ve just put a piece of chouriço in there,” said Carolyn, “but she would actually grind up the chouriço and chicken and combine it with mayonnaise. When my husband was a child and took that to school the other children would try to buy his lunch from him.”

Carolyn kicked up Maria’s recipe by adding caramelised onions and sriracha mayonnaise.

“I like everything spicy,” she said.

The former CedarBridge Academy teacher said she would often send recipes to her friends and family with a funny story attached.

“They kept saying I should write a book,” she said.

The cooking enthusiast is halfway through a Master’s degree in creative writing at Florida International University in Miami. As part of that programme she’s writing a book about a woman who inherits a recreational vehicle park in Arizona.

“Publishers are now looking for writers with platforms and a ready audience,” she said, “so that is partly why I started the blog to build up that platform.

“The book has nothing to do with cooking, but the blog is a start.”

One of her more popular recipes is a Mexican dip.

“It’s a fairly simple dip that I came up with,” she said. “It is a combination of sour cream, cream cheese, cayenne pepper and a lot of tomatoes, cilantro, onions and red pepper cut up and sprinkled on top. Kids seem to like it, despite all the vegetables. My friends always say, ‘Are you bringing the dip?’ The dip will be on my next blog post.”

(The Royal Gazette reporter Jessie Moniz Hardy and photographer Nicola Muirhead tried the Mexican dip and we can testify that it was indeed yummy!)

She and her husband have three children, Leah, Ellen and Coleman. Ellen works as a graphic designer in Washington DC, and helped with the blog design; Carolyn takes her own photos.

“Now I never eat a hot meal because everything goes cold while I take photographs of it, to post on the blog,” she said.

She plans to post both Cape Breton and Bermuda-inspired recipes. She has already written a comparison of cooking Bermuda lobster to Cape Breton lobster.

She wrote: “First of all, Nova Scotia lobster is nothing like Bermuda lobster. It has claws. It’s very much like Maine lobster, but with a lot more personality and without the funny accent.

It doesn’t have the snob appeal of it’s spiny cousin, but that makes it a more accessible, friendly meal. In fact, Nova Scotia lobsters prefer to be eaten in large groups surrounded by cold beer. Nova Scotia lobsters don’t require fancy tools or sauces and they are best eaten on a bed of newspapers.”

Of the Bermuda lobster she wrote: “After an amazing meal, I’m going to share the secret of cooking Bermuda (spiny) lobster. First, you go to the burly fisherman on Trimingham Hill (risk your life trying to park and cross the road) and stare into his cooler looking at all of the crustaceans. You inspect the ones that are still crawling and decide you’d rather have a cool, dead one.”

Read more: www.dontburntheribs.com.