Midweek meals in the Mash House tend to be as fuss-free as possible. We eat sometime between 5:30 and 6:00pm, and meals need to be prepared with at least one small child underfoot. For that reason, we’ve been making our ‘blog dishes’ on weekends. However, as we’ve mentioned previously, we’re moving away from our handy local African supermarkets in three and a half months so we are desperately trying to cram in our remaining 23 countries before then! Some fuss-free international recipes were therefore essential to our quest.
Enter The International Table‘s recipe for Nigerien (note that this is NigeriEn, as in from Niger, not NigeriAn, as in from Nigeria) djerma. This recipe is perhaps not the most traditionally Nigerien, in terms of its use of a blender and a slow cooker (and Elyse on the website acknowledges that this is an adaptation of a more authentic recipe), but technological shortcuts are the lifeline of parents everywhere, so we went with it. (Elyse’s post also told us that ‘The same sun that melts wax is also capable of hardening clay’ is a Nigerien proverb, which scored it some extra Brownie points because it took Miranda back to her childhood days of listening to Amy Grant and this excellent song.)
What we hadn’t factored in was that the aforementioned needy children were both going to have colds on the day we made it, rendering the little one cranky and clingy and the older one not at nursery. Sigh. The fact that Miranda was able to prepare it all and get it in the slow cooker predominantly one-handed and whilst being subjected to a barrage of facts about animals is testament to how easy this recipe really is.
Djerma
Ingredients
1.5kg chicken thighs (the recipe actually called for drumsticks but we prefer thighs)
Cooking oil
1 onion, diced
1 garlic clove, minced
1 tin of tomatoes
1 tbsp paprika
1 1/2 tsp dried thyme
1/2 tsp curry powder
2 bay leaves (which we forgot to add in the chaos of the meal prep, oops)
2 carrots, diced
2 tbsp peanut butter
Salt and pepper, to taste
2-4 cups chicken stock (we used 2 cups)
3 tbsp flat leaf parsley, chopped
2 spring onions, sliced
Rice, to serve
Method
1. Heat oil in a pan and brown the chicken over a medium-high heat.
2. Make a tomato sauce by blending together the tomatoes, onion and garlic.
3. Put the chicken, tomato sauce, paprika, thyme, curry powder, bay leaves, carrots, peanut butter and seasoning in a slow cooker. Add enough stock to just cover.
4. Cook on high for 4 hours or low for 8 hours. (We then moved it to a pan on the stove for the last half hour of cooking to try to reduce the sauce a bit, as it was very runny.)
5. Serve with rice and garnished with the parsley and spring onions.
Serves 4-6
Given the simplicity of this meal, we enjoyed it more than we expected to. The International Table’s Elyse complained that it was yet another African peanut stew, but our only complaint is kind of the inverse of that: we didn’t think it was peanutty enough, as the 2 tablespoons of peanut butter got lost in the rest of the sauce. If we make this again (which we’d love to for the simplicity of it, but may not because neither of our children wanted to eat it) we’d experiment with drastically increasing the quantity of peanut butter, to let it sing a bit more.
That’s another dish down… we’ll be back in a few days!
Good Food on Bad Plates 