‘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…
Good Food on Bad Plates 