Of shoehorns and schedules: Mauritanian bonava

Rose: I don’t see what all of the fuss is about. It doesn’t look any bigger than the Mauretania.
Cal: You can be blasé about some things, Rose, but not about Titanic. It’s over a hundred feet longer than the Mauretania, and far more luxurious.

Twelve-year-old Miranda didn’t know that there is an African country called Mauritania, and certainly not that although its name is pronounced the same as the name of the vessel that was the largest ship in the world when it was built in 1906, it is spelt differently (the ship having been named after the ancient Roman province of Mauretania on the northwest African coast). All she knew was that James Cameron’s Titanic was (and still is) a masterpiece. Thirty-eight-year-old Miranda is conscious that we only have a handful of countries left in this challenge and she still hasn’t managed to forcibly shoehorn a Titanic reference into a blog post, so thank goodness we’ve finally found an opportunity.

And yes – ‘forcibly shoehorn’ is somewhat tautological, but honestly, it’s probably appropriate in this context.

In case anyone else needs educating about Mauritania (the country), here’s the brief rundown: it’s the 28th-largest country in the world, but 90% of its territory is in the Sahara, so population-wise it is relatively small (just over 4 million). Our trusty Lonely Planet travel book says it is characterised by endless sand, oases, desertification and birdlife.

Image from Mappr

Foodwise, dishes vary considerably from region to region. In coastal areas where there is a large fishing culture, seafood dishes are common, and the national dish of Mauritania is considered to be thieboudienne. We’d already made this for Senegal so kept looking. In doing so, we learnt that livestock farming is very important to Mauritanians, and that lamb features prominently in many traditional dishes, such as bonava, a simple lamb stew.

In this case, simple means ‘will work without being given much attention or love’ rather than quick. The stew takes 2-2.5 hours from start to finish. Very little of this time is hands-on, but one thing that is hands-on is small needy children, so Miranda (who was attempting this single-handedly with both offspring present) was very organised and wrote out a little schedule to make sure dinner got on the table on time.

Bonava

Ingredients
1kg lamb shoulder, diced
500g potatoes, peeled and cut into large pieces
3 onions, thinly sliced
1/4 cup white vinegar
2 bay leaves
1/4 cup peanut oil
Salt and pepper, to taste
Chilli powder, to taste (optional)
Boiling water

Method
1. Blanch the onions by immersing them in boiling water for 5 minutes. Drain well.
2. Heat the oil in a large pot over a low heat and saute the onions for a few minutes without browning.
3. Turn up the heat to medium-high and saute the meat until browned.
4. Add the vinegar, bay leaves, salt, pepper and chilli powder (if using).
5. Cover with boiling water, just enough to submerge the meat.
6. Cover the pot and cook for 1 hour at medium heat.
7. Add the potatoes and cook for 15 minutes over medium heat, and then a further 15 minutes over low heat.
8. Adjust seasoning and serve.
Serves 3-4

(Yes, this saucepan is too small for this job – this was an effort to save on washing up by using a pan we’d already used for something else. We just about got away with it.)

The little schedule made this even easier than it would have been otherwise. In fact, most of the early steps took even less time than we’d allowed for. This really is a ‘throw stuff in a pot and let it cook’ kind of meal, with the except of briefly sauteing the onions and lamb. Ordinarily we’d brown meat in batches, but this was all thrown in at once and this didn’t harm it at all – it was about as tender as lamb can get! As a whole, we enjoyed this a lot more than we expected to, when really all it is is lamb and potatoes, and the beautifully cooked lamb had a lot to do with that. The boys weren’t to be convinced, though: they both ate the potatoes, but Baby Mash didn’t even try the lamb and Preschooler Mash had two small pieces and then claimed not to like it.

Our only complaint is that the recipe we followed said that the dish would have ‘a delicious peanut flavour’ (from the oil, presumably) and an ‘acidic touch’ (from the vinegar). Neither of these was very obvious to us, and we’d have liked them to be more pronounced just to make it different from any other lamb stew. It’s only a small gripe, though, because we did enjoy the finished product, even if it wasn’t quite what we were expecting.

Incidentally, lamb and potatoes was one of the meals served at the last first class dinner on the Titanic, and what Rose and Cal ordered in the film (‘with very little mint sauce’). Bet you didn’t think we’d be able to bring this blog post full circle.

Short and sweet: Cape Verdean arroz con atum

‘Short’ is in the title of this post to refer to the length of the post (and number of photos), the length of the cooking time and the length of time it took us to eat it because we didn’t make enough of it. Oops! ‘Sweet’ isn’t really relevant to anything except completing the turn of phrase, although we did enjoy the meal (does that count as sweet?).

Anyway, the national dish of Cape Verde is cachupa, which sounds pretty delicious: a stew made with fish, meat and vegetables. We found a great-looking recipe on Crumb Snatched, a blog about ‘bringing Cape Verdean comfort food to the table.’ Yes please. Unfortunately, said recipe contained a number of ingredients that we knew we weren’t going to be able to get hold of easily (corned beef brisket, salt pork, hominy, yuca, collard greens and a range of dried beans). Not wanting to fail to do this dish justice like we did with Senegalese thieboudienne, we dug a little deeper on Crumb Snatched and found something much more simple: arroz con atum (rice with tuna). Both kids eat rice and sometimes appear to like tuna, so this seemed very achievable as a midweek exploration of Cape Verdean food.

Arroz con atum

Ingredients
400g tin of tuna in olive oil (preferably Cape Verdean or Portuguese – we couldn’t find either so had to make do with Italian)
2 cups long grain rice, rinsed just before adding it to the pan
1 small onion, diced
1 tbsp crushed garlic
1 bay leaf
1 small tomato, quartered
2 1/2 cups water
1 cup manzanilla olives (we could only find ones stuffed with jalapeno!)
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp annatto (see note below on this)
1-2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground black pepper

Method
1. Drain the oil from the tuna and reserve the oil.
2. Add 3-4 tbsp of the reserved oil to a deep pot or Dutch oven over medium heat, then add the garlic, onion and tomato.
3. Saute for 5-7 minutes, until the onion is translucent and the tomato has broken down.
4. Add the seasonings, saute everything for about 30 seconds, then add the tuna. Use a wooden spoon to break it apart slightly.
5. Add the olives, bay leaf and water and bring to the boil.
6. Add the rice, stir and then cover the pot. Cook over a very low heat for 20-25 minutes. Do not mix or uncover the rice while it is cooking.
7. Taste the rice to check the texture. If you are happy with the texture, turn the flame off, re-cover the pot and let the rice rest for 5-10 minutes. Alternatively, keep cooking (adding a little more water or a damp paper towel on top of the rice) before letting it rest.
Serves 4

A note on the seasonings: the original recipe used 1 packet of yellow sazon instead of the paprika and annatto. We don’t really know what sazon is but didn’t find out because it appears to be both controversial and sodium/MSG-laden, so we stuck with the alternative of paprika/annatto instead. By all means use sazon if you prefer.

We made two mistakes in our cooking of arroz con atum. The first was halving a ‘serves 6’ recipe and expecting it to be enough. If the original served six, those six mustn’t have been very hungry. As you can see in the photo above, these were not dinner-sized portions, at least not in our household! We’ll remember that if we make this again, which we may well do because it was very tasty. You can probably imagine what it tasted like, because the ingredients are very basic, but it was nice to do something unfamiliar with familiar ingredients.

The second mistake we made was thinking that our children would like the meal. They both did eat some of it, Preschooler Mash somewhat under duress, but they were much more interested in polishing off nearly an entire Galia melon between the two of them. At least they went to bed with full stomachs…

Chickening out for the children: Senegalese thieboudienne

When we made Ghanaian jollof rice, we mentioned that we planned to revisit jollof rice when we got to Senegal. This is because according to most sources, Senegal is where this popular dish originated, and, in fact, UNESCO has put Senegalese jollof on its ‘representative list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity’. We weren’t going to argue with that.

What we weren’t prepared for is the fact that Senegalese jollof rice is very, very different from the Ghanaian version. Ghanaian jollof was tomatoey rice with some frozen veg thrown in. Senegalese jollof is also known as thieboudienne and is an elaborate fish, vegetable and rice situation that takes a lot longer to cook. (Thieboudienne is also the national dish of Mauritania, incidentally, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.) We did briefly consider making something else, but if we were being honest with ourselves we had to admit that we’d already committed to thieboudienne… so that was that.

The next hurdle, though, was some of the ingredients. According to 196 Flavors, a traditional Senegalese jollof contains three ingredients we were unfamiliar with: nététou, guedj and yété. Nététou is also known as fermented seeds from the African locust bean tree and is described as having a ‘funky smell’. It can apparently be compared with miso paste. Guedj is salted and dried fish. Yété is mollusc flesh that has been fermented in the sand.

We might have been unfamiliar with these ingredients but what we are very familiar with is the palates of our children. This left us with a dilemma: should we go to the African supermarket to try to find these ingredients in order to make the dish as authentic as possible, but run the risk that the junior Mashes refuse to eat it? Or save ourselves the journey and also the frustration of trying to get a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old to eat a dish flavoured with fermented beans, dried fish and what can realistically only be described as rotten inverterbrate?

Reader, forgive us. We chose the path of least resistance. Read on to find out if it was worth it.

Thieboudienne

Ingredients
3-4 lean whole fish with firm flesh, cleaned and scored (traditionally grouper; bass, sea bream, pike, hake, tilapia or snapper would also be acceptable; we used bass)
1 bunch of parsley, chopped
2 shallots, minced
4 cloves of garlic, minced
4 habanero or Scotch Bonnet peppers, chopped (unsurprisingly, we also left these out)
2 beef or vegetable stock cubes (we used vegetable)
1 1-inch piece of nététou
2 small guedj
1 cup vegetable oil
1 onion, chopped
4 tbsp tomato puree
1 tin of peeled plum tomatoes
4 bay leaves
2 carrots, peeled and cut into chunks
2 potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks
1 aubergine, thickly sliced
1 cabbage, cut into wedges
1 cassava root, peeled and cut into chunks (we didn’t have any cassava so used some swede… the veg can be pretty approximate)
6 okras
4 cups broken rice (or long grain rice, which is what we used)
1 lime, sliced
Salt and pepper

Method
1. Prepare the fish stuffing by mixing the parsley, 2 garlic cloves, shallots, 2 hot peppers, 1 stock cube and some salt in a mortar and pestle. Set aside.
2. Stuff each of the scored cuts in the fish with the mixture.
3. Heat the vegetable oil in a deep skillet or Dutch oven and fry the fish for 6-7 minutes on each side. Set aside.
4. Reduce the heat and add the remaining 2 garlic cloves, remaining 2 peppers and onion. Cook for 5 minutes.
5. Meanwhile, grind the remaining stock cube, nététou and guedj using a food processor.
6. Add the powder, tomato puree and tinned tomatoes to the pan and season. Simmer for 5 minutes.
7. Add the bay leaves and 250ml water. Simmer for 15 minutes over low heat.
8. Add the vegetables and simmer for 30 minutes. Remove the vegetables as they are cooked through but still firm and reserve.
9. Add the rice and enough water to cover the rice (we added 1500ml at this point, and another 250ml later in the cook when the rice was still too crunchy).
10. Cook for 20-30 minutes uncovered, stirring occasionally to stop it from sticking. (At around the 25 minute mark we tried it but the rice was still crunchy. This is when we added the extra water; we also cooked it with the lid on for another 5 minutes or so.)
11. Add the vegetables and fish back to the pan (or, like us, transfer everything to a more enormous pan) and cook for an additional 5 minutes.
12. Serve hot with lime slices.
Serves 6-8

Normally we would post photos of the cooking process at this point but before we do that, we’re going to have another whinge about Tesco’s produce. Look at this pathetic excuse for an aubergine we were forced to work with (carrot for scale):

Anyway, here’s what the dish looked like:

Time for a bigger pan…

Please excuse the hurried presentation (including the lack of lime) — hangry children were waiting…

So — was it worth making an unusually ‘processy’ dish just because UNESCO said so? And was it worth making it inauthentically so the kids would eat it?

The answer to the first question, we think, is yes. It did take a lot longer to prepare and cook than anything else we’ve made recently, but it’s so iconic, it had to be done. We very rarely cook fresh fish like that so that was a nice treat, and the fish combined with all the different vegetables meant there was a lot more variety in each mouthful than there was in the Ghanaian jollof.

As for the second question… we’re not sure. The kids did both eat some of it (which is good because we made enough to feed the 5000), so that was a victory. But there’s no way we can claim to know what Senegalese jollof tastes like, despite the amount of time and effort we spent on it. This might have to be another addition to the ‘try it again one day’ list.

Bonkers breakfast: Gambian thiakry

Instead of making yet another peanut-based stew for our dish from The Gambia, we decided to cook thiakry. Thiakry is a couscous pudding which is arguably a dessert food, but we decided we’d make it for breakfast because the recipe we found first seemed relatively healthy and hearty. Since making our thiakry, we’ve found other recipes that use a lot of condensed milk, which admittedly sounds more delicious (condensed milk makes anything more delicious), so we’re not sure which is correct. Probably the condensed milk version… maybe we’ll have to make it again.

Technically this should also be made with a special millet couscous, or, failing that, millet grains. We didn’t have either so we used regular wheat couscous. We also didn’t have a vanilla pod so used vanilla extract. And we didn’t have shredded coconut so we used desiccated. But hey, other than that, we were spot on.

Thiakry

Ingredients
1 cup dry couscous
1/2 cup plain yoghurt
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup sour cream
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 vanilla pod, scraped
1/4 coconut sugar, or to taste (because we were having this for breakfast, we just used 1 tbsp of caster sugar)
1/2 pineapple, chopped
Grilled pineapple, yoghurt and shredded coconut, to serve

Method
1. Cover the couscous with boiling water for 5 minutes or until the water is absorbed. Allow to cool for 5 minutes.
2. In a large bowl, whisk together the yoghurt, milk, sour cream, nutmeg, cinnamon, scraped vanilla pod and sugar.
3. Stir in the couscous and chopped pineapple.
4. Chill in the fridge for 30 minutes.
5. Serve topped with grilled pineapple, yoghurt and shredded coconut.
Serves 4

Now, here is the story of our breakfast:

Baby Mash had had a late night but woken up at a normal time so was already cranky. Ash had made the thiakry in advance, but forgotten about the grilled pineapple, so whilst he thought he was organised, he wasn’t. Meanwhile, Preschooler Mash was gallivanting in the garden.

We were about to sit down to eat in the garden when Miranda noticed a trail of fox excrement smeared about the patio, where — we soon discovered — Preschooler Mash had stood in it and then run around with it on the bottom of his shoe. Ash then set to work disinfecting the patio and the shoe.

Faced with thiakry, Baby Mash decided it wasn’t for him and proceeded to throw it to the floor. Miranda removed his plate before he could throw too much of it (a small mercy being that sticky couscous is a lot easier to wipe up than individual grains), but that made him astutely aware that he was confined to his chair rather than roaming the garden. Not wanting him to go and sit in the big puddle of water from the aforementioned cleaning mission, we tried to keep him at the table, which resulted in deafening, screaming rage. It was definitely still sleep-in hour for normal people on a Saturday, so Miranda whisked him inside to try to protect the neighbours.

This meant that Preschooler Mash was left outside on his own, and at this point he started wailing because he was lonely. Sorry, neighbours. The good news is that he did actually eat quite a lot of his thiakry, amused by the fact that he was eating couscous for breakfast. Meanwhile, Baby Mash’s tantrum continued indoors until we eventually persuaded him that going to sleep might be a good idea.

As for Miranda and Ash, well, we grabbed mouthfuls of thiakry here and there amidst all the chaos. We liked it, but didn’t love it. Adding the full quota of sugar might have made it more enjoyable as a pudding, and using vanilla seeds instead of extract would have made the flavours more balanced. We really do have no idea whether this is even close to the original dish, though. It very closely resembles the picture on the recipe we used, but another recipe we looked at showed something much runnier, looking more like rice pudding. Any Gambians reading this, please do feel free to chime in — we’d love to get it right!

From rant to rave: Bissau-Guinean peanut sauce with butternut squash

This post is going to start with a rant about Tesco, with whom we do our online grocery order (purely because ‘better the devil you know’) and who have an impressive track record of sending bizarre substitutions and/or sub-standard produce. Our recent attempts to buy butternut squash (for butternut squash-centric dishes) have been no exception. Check out the pathetic size of these (onion and apple – both of which were quite small) for scale:

The one next to the apple was clearly not going to feed a family of four in a Bissau-Guinean dish, so we had to supplement it with a sweet potato that we fortunately already had.

Anyway, yes, we’ve reached the last of the three African Guineas, Guinea-Bissau, or Portuguese Guinea (Guinea was French Guinea, Equatorial Guinea was Spanish Guinea, and Cameroon and Togo were actually German Guinea, when European colonists arrived in Africa). The links between the regions, especially Guinea and Guinea-Bissau which are adjacent to one another, mean that finding a defined national dish for each country is not an easy task. When we looked for Bissau-Guinean recipes, we mostly found Guinean ones. Eventually we came across a recipe for Guinean peanut sauce with butternut squash which came from a former Peace Corps volunteer in the Bissau-Guinean village of Cansamange. Yet another peanut sauce, yes, but it wasn’t with chicken (and was with a vegetable our children actually eat) so we thought we’d give it a go.

Peanut sauce with butternut squash

Ingredients
1 (good-sized) butternut squash, cut into cubes
1 small tomato, roughly chopped
1/2 cup peanut butter
1 cup warm water
2 tbsp cooking oil
2 onions, thickly sliced
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 bay leaf
Salt and pepper to taste
2 tsp lemon juice
Rice, to serve

Method
1. Put the squash cubes in a saucepan, cover with water and simmer for about 20 minutes until tender. Reserve the cooking water.
2. Meanwhile, putt the tomato, peanut butter and water in a food processor and blend until pureed.
3. Heat the oil in a frying pan over medium heat,add the onion and cook until softened.
4. Add the peanut butter mixture, bay leaf and garlic, and season.
5. Stir well and bring to the boil.
6. Reduce the heat to low and simmer for 15 minutes, adding the squash liquid as needed to keep the consistency of thick soup.
7. Add the squash and cook for another 15 minutes, adding more liquid as needed.
8. Add the lemon juice and adjust seasoning.
9. Serve with rice.
Serves 3-4

The reviews on the original publication of this recipe are VERY mixed, with some people saying it’s wonderful and others using phrases like ‘bland, sloppy mess.’ We’re pleased to report that we fall in the former camp. We didn’t ever think we’d dislike it, but we were pleasantly surprised by how much we liked it. Despite not having a lot of variety from one mouthful to the next, we really enjoyed each of those mouthfuls and happily went back for more.

We should clarify that the ‘we’ of the previous paragraph refers to Miranda and Ash. Remember we said that both kids like butternut squash/sweet potato and that they basically live on peanut butter? Baby Mash didn’t even try it. Preschooler Mash whined that he didn’t like it, then did actually eat a few mouthfuls but certainly didn’t clear his plate. Still, it was better than flat-out refusal, so this might be one to attempt again.

A bit too simple: Guinean poulet yassa

What we can say with some confidence is that the national dish of Guinea — or at least a popular dish in Guinea — is poulet yassa (yes, more chicken). What we can’t swear to is whether we made it correctly. The distinguishing feature of this one is the lemon and onion marinade, which we did do, but we also read that it contains mustard, but then couldn’t find a single recipe that actually included mustard. So, with thanks to National Foods for the recipe, we’ve made a version of poulet yassa, but if anyone from Guinea is reading this and would like to tell us how close to the mark it is, please go ahead.

Poulet yassa

Ingredients
5 chicken thighs (skin on, bone in)
Juice of 3 large lemons
3 large onions, peeled and sliced
3 cloves of garlic, minced
1 bay leaf
1 1/2 tbsp peanut oil
1 small chilli pepper, deseeded and finely chopped
1 1/2 chicken stock cubes, crumbled
Cooking oil
2 cups water
Salt and pepper
Rice, to serve

Method
1. The night before, make the marinade by mixing the lemon juice, onions, garlic, bay leaf, peanut oil, chilli and stock cubes in a large bowl.
2. Add the chicken and mix thoroughly until the meat is coated with the marinade. Cover and chill in the fridge overnight.
3. The next day, either roast the chicken in the oven or fry in a pan with some oil until golden brown and cooked through, reserving the marinade.
4. Set the chicken aside and saute the onions from the marinade in a little oil.
5. Once the onions are brown and caramelised, add the water to the pan and stir.
6. Reduce the heat and allow to simmer for 30 minutes.
7. After 30 minutes, add the chicken and let it simmer for a few minutes.
8. Serve with rice.
Serves 2-3

That was a lot of photos for a dish with hardly any processes haha. It doesn’t get much more simple, but it was almost too simple – we wanted a bit more substance to the sauce (although, as always, the fact that we didn’t add chilli or salt until it got to the table probably didn’t help). Maybe it did need the mustard after all. The kids were equally unfussed: Preschooler Mash did try a bite but claimed not to like it, whilst Baby Mash didn’t try it at all. Probably not one we’ll repeat!

Survival sugar: Sierra Leonean ginger cake

Ash is currently on a work jolly in Dublin, meaning Miranda and the two needy offspring have been left to fend for themselves for three days. It was therefore the perfect time to stumble upon a recipe for Sierra Leonean ginger cake (for Miranda to eat once the kids are in bed, obviously… she’s not silly enough to share it). It doesn’t even matter whether this recipe is fully authentic (although it’s from a promisingly-titled website, The African Gourmet, and apparently ginger is grown in Sierra Leone). It’s kismet. (It also isn’t a chicken stew.)

Ginger cake

Ingredients
1 1/4 cups plain flour
1 tbsp fresh ginger, grated
100g unsalted butter
2 medium eggs
1/2 cup milk (ideally whole, but semi-skimmed worked just fine)
1/2 cup caster sugar
1/2 cup light brown sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp salt

Method
1. Grease and line a loaf tin and preheat the oven to 180C.
2. Cream the butter and sugars until light and fluffy.
3. Mix in the eggs, fresh ginger and vanilla.
4. Mix in the milk.
5. Mix in the flour, baking powder, ground ginger, cinnamon and salt until incorporated.
6. Pour the batter into the tin and bake for 45-50 minutes.

There’s nothing particularly remarkable or unusual about this cake, but there doesn’t always need to be. It’s moist, flavoursome and one of those cakes that gets better as it ages. On the first day of eating it, Miranda was disappointed that the ginger flavour was more subtle than she had expected. By the second day, though, it was much more pronounced. It could be argued that anything would have tasted good once both kids were asleep, but we’re going to go with ‘the cake gets better as it ages’. Today is day three so hopefully that will continue to be true!

Coastal chicken stew: Ivorian kedjenou

Yes, we’re about to give you a recipe for another African chicken stew (Cote d’Ivoire’s kedjenou) , but this one is a bit different because a) it doesn’t include any peanut butter, b) it also traditionally doesn’t include any oil — the chicken cooks in its own juices in a pot called a canari, which is not dissimilar to a more well-known African cooking vessel, the tagine.

(Image source: La Maison de l’Afrique)

However, we used a large Dutch oven rather than a canari, so we took a leaf out of 196 Flavors’ book and used a bit of oil, just to be on the safe side. We also lazily used a tin of tomatoes instead of fresh ones, which added some liquid, but it was still quite incredible how saucy this was without any other form of liquid in the recipe. We wish we’d taken a ‘before’ photo!

Kedjenou

Ingredients
1 whole chicken, portioned
4 large tomatoes, peeled, deseeded and diced (or a tin of chopped tomatoes)
3 onions, diced
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
1 aubergine, cut into large chunks
3 tbsp cooking oil
2 chicken stock cubes, crumbled
1 inch of ginger, grated
3 bay leaves
1 tbsp paprika
3 hot peppers, deseeded and finely diced
Salt and pepper
2 tbsp chopped parsley, to garnish
Rice, to serve

Method
1. Put the chicken pieces in a large Dutch oven or heavy-bottomed pot.
2. Pour the oil over the chicken.
3. Add the other ingredients and mix well.
4. Cover the pot and cook on low heat for 45 minutes, stirring and turning the pot every 15 minutes.
5. Garnish with the parsley and serve with rice.
Serves 4-6

Well that has to be one of the shortest methods for any recipe we’ve posted so far! It doesn’t get much simpler than ‘chuck it all in a pot and cook it). Don’t panic if you’re making this and it looks like the chicken is never going to cook — to begin with, we thought we were going to be standing over the stove for a lot longer than 45 minutes but, like magic, it came good.

However, we don’t feel like we’ve done kedjenou justice. We read that a good kedjenou is always quite spicy, and we once again left out the chilli so we could serve it to the kids. We commented while we were eating it that we’ll have to make all of these West African dishes again in the future when we can actually turn up the heat!

That said, we enjoyed it even without the chilli — we were actually surprised by how much we enjoyed it, considering how simple it was. The aubergine gave it a Mediterranean character which, as mentioned above, made it feel very different from the other chicken stews we’ve made recently. Also, miraculously, both of our children actually ate a piece of (beautifully tender, you’d-be-crazy-not-to) chicken. Maybe the fact that we were able to eat out in the sunshine contributed to the Mediterranean feel and put them in a cheerful holiday mood. If only we could read their minds.

Nostalgic yet not: Liberian peanut soup

Pre-kids, we used to regularly make a dish we called ‘Greg’s chicken’. We’ve mentioned it on here in the past, though you’ll have to forgive us for not digging through the archives to figure out which post it was in. The reason it was dubbed Greg’s chicken is because the recipe (actually entitled Ginger and Peanut Spiced Chicken) came from a YouTube channel called Greg’s Kitchen, hosted by a slightly bonkers Aussie bloke who sometimes made some delicious dishes and sometimes made more questionable things like pizza using leftover KFC. Greg is still around on YouTube, although he seems to have steered more towards food reviews than actually cooking his own stuff these days.

But why are we going on about Greg? Well, the sauce for ‘Greg’s chicken’ was made from sriracha (hence why it was a pre-kids meal), peanut butter, soy sauce, tomato puree, chicken stock, ginger and garlic. If you read the recipe below for Liberian peanut soup (or peanut stew, depending on which recipe you read), you’ll observe that it contains many of the same ingredients. Given that Liberians serve their peanut soup with rice, and we used to always serve Greg’s chicken with rice, it really did feel like we were eating the sauce from our old favourite dinner without the substance.

Peanut soup

Ingredients
1/2 cup (or more) of creamy peanut butter
3 tbsp cooking oil
1 tin of tomatoes (the recipe said 8oz, we only had 16oz but it seemed to work OK)
1 onion, diced
1 tbsp minced garlic
1-2 habanero peppers, diced
2 vegetable stock cubes soaked in 2 1/2 cups of water
Additional 1/2 cup of water
Salt and pepper to taste|
Rice and toasted ground sesame seeds, to serve

Method
1. Heat the oil in a stockpot over medium heat.
2. Add the chopped onion and saute until it turns a light golden brown colour.
3. Add the garlic and stir fry for a few minutes.
4. Add the tinned tomatoes and stir to combine, then stir fry until the liquid has evaporated.
5. Add the peanut butter (as much as you want, basically – we’d recommend even more than the 1/2 cup in the recipe if you like peanut butter) and stir until combined and smooth.
6. Gradually add the vegetable stock while stirring continuously, and keep stirring until the tomatoes and peanut butter are dissolved into the broth.
7. Simmer for 2 minutes, then add the other 1/2 cup of water.
8. Season to taste, then add the habanero and stir to combine.
9. Bring to the boil, then boil for 15-20 minutes, stirring occasionally to prevent it from sticking.
10. Serve with rice and sesame seeds.
Serves 4

Not many photos this time because there really wasn’t much to it. It was nice to have something that wasn’t a chicken stew for a change, but whilst there’s no reason to feel like this wasn’t a full meal (it had protein from the peanuts, carb from the rice and veg from the tomato), it just didn’t seem complete. That’s not to say that it wasn’t tasty: we enjoyed it, particularly after adding sriracha in an homage to Greg’s chicken, and we weren’t hungry afterwards, so having said that, it probably did everything a dinner is supposed to do. Everything, we suppose, except actually excite us.

Nor did it excite our children (who both eat peanut butter like it’s going out of fashion), one of whom who refused to try it at all and one who tried it once but then didn’t go back for seconds. Sigh.

Incidentally, apparently this is also commonly eaten in Gambia, but the Gambian version would incorporate more vegetables – so more like the other stews we’ve been eating recently. We think the texture of the vegetables (not to mention the variety of flavour) would have made this more of a hit. But we do fully acknowledge that it’s our European palates making that judgement, and there was nothing at all wrong with the flavour of this one.