Meal 63: Gambia

The Gambia, a former British West African colony, is a little sliver of a country, hugging a river of the same name and surrounded by the formerly French Senegal. I find it appropriate that we held this Nosh in Portland, Oregon, a riverine city -- and, thankfully, one that has a few African markets!

While Gambia is squarely in West Africa, the food struck me as borrowing major parts from both Central and North Africa. The stew, with peanut butter and palm oil, is similar to many things we've made from the center of the continent, while the rice and couscous dishes remind me quite a bit of North African and even central Asian cooking.

Huge thanks to my aunt Marcia for hosting us, and a bunch of our friends, at her lovely house with a third of an acre for a back yard which doubles as an Urban Farm Collective site. Joining us were Molly, Jens, Eric, Sarah, Alley, Andrew, Viola, Laura, Drew, Suj, Craig, Laura (yes, there were a total of three Lauras there!), Luca, and Marc.

Pepe soup | Spicy chicken and tomato soup | Recipe

They say a hot, spicy soup on a warm day cools you down. I'm not sure I entirely buy it: I was warm inside, and sweating a bit, but didn't feel much cooler, in the mid-80s heat. Anyway, this is a pretty simple but tasty soup, made of simmering panfried chicken with bouillon and chilies to make a tasty broth, then enriching with tomato paste. The soup was a bit thin, with not a ton of chicken per bowl, but that might be authentic. Also we couldn't find anything resembling the hot African peppers called for; I would have preferred scotch bonnets but the closest we found was serranos. All in all, pretty tasty, I'd use this as a basis for something else in the future. (Maybe throw rice in there to enrich it?)

Benachin | Fish and rice with vegetables | Recipe

Benachin means "one pot," which is all you should need to cook this dish. The recipe I followed, for a fish version, wasn't the most specific -- it calls for "six white fish" without specifying what type or how big -- so I estimated with about three pounds of ling cod for a double recipe. (The "bongo fish," on the other hand, is clearly a dry-smoked fish with the tail stuffed in its mouth!) We improvised a bit across recipes, throwing in butternut squash and eggplant, and leaving out bitter tomato which we had no chance of coming across. I did my best job of following the technique of steaming the rice above the stew before throwing in, but honestly I don't think it was worth the hassle, next time I'd just throw the rice right in the stew after rinsing. All in all, this was a pretty tasty dish, although I think I made way too much for the crowd!

Plasas | Spinach stew with peanut butter and beef | Recipe

Aunt Marcia had mentioned before I came to town that there was amazing local spinach to be had, so I was happy to find this recipe using spinach. Unfortunately, with their spell of heat the spinach was gone from the farmers markets, but the supermarket still had fine stuff, which we used in place of frozen. Mixed in with that classic  technique of simmering beef into a gravy rich with palm oil and a bit of peanut sauce, this was in my mind one of the better of the African stews I've made.

Chakery | Pineapple-dairy sauce over couscous | Recipe

Between the main course and dessert, we went out back and picked marionberries and raspberries from the garden, so naturally they, very incongruously, made their way onto a few plates. I was surprised to see a recipe with so much fresh dairy product from an African country, but then I saw it a few more times and was convinced of its authenticity. There's no added sugar, but between the pineapple (we used fresh instead of canned), evaporated milk, and vanilla yogurt, plus the richness of cooking the couscous in coconut milk and the sour cream in the sauce, this was quite a heady dessert. And yes, the berries went quite well.

We came back to New York the next day, and did a Georgian feast soon after that. The writeup is coming soon!

Meal 47: Democratic Republic of the Congo

What a special night! 75 guests, most of whom had never been to a Nosh before, gathered in the beautiful ballroom at Hostelling International on the Upper West Side, for a meal of classic Congolese dishes.

The idea came from Ari, the community engagement manager at the hostel, who saw our email on The Listserve and reached out to see if we might want to do a Nosh with them. With a big venue and kitchen, we decided to align it with World Food Day and make it a big fundraising opportunity...and at the end of the evening, that made for $1,400, or 5,600 meals to people in need! According to the WFP, the Democratic Republic of the Congo — the former Zaire — ranks lowest in the world for human development and hunger, and 70% have inadequate food. Needless to say, a rich and tasty meal like ours, with plenty of meats, vegetables, and oil, is far beyond the reach of most Congolese.

It turns out it would have been hard to find a more convenient neighborhood for cooking the meal. Less than a mile away is a wonderful little African market that had the palmnut sauce, cassava powder, and other specialty goods I needed, sold by a very friendly and enthusiastic proprietor. The manager at the nearby Gristedes let me borrow a shopping cart to haul back all the meat, and the cart proved very handy for hauling back a huge load of greens, plantains, and other produce.

There's no way we could have done this meal without the help of our many volunteers, who helped set up, cook, and clean up. The huge kitchen area comprising four ranges, two sinks, and dozens of pots and frying pans was buzzing with chopping, frying, stirring, and only one having to find the maintenance staff to crank up the ventilation hoods. Huge thanks to everyone who pitched in! And we owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Ari and the rest of the staff at the hostel who were incredibly friendly and accommodating.

Arachides rôties | Roasted peanuts

These freshly shelled peanuts came in little hand-tied baggies, a dollar a piece. So simple to throw them in a hot, dry frying pan, shake 'em around for a few minutes until they start to darken, then toss in a bowl with a little salt. Great as a snack or a topping.

Poulet mwamba | Chicken in palmnut sauce | Recipe

Not only did we cook forty pounds of dark-meat chicken, but to get it to cook faster (and to follow the recipe), we had to cut it into bite-sized pieces. Turns out I learned the hard, and potentially stupid, way that a glass cutting board isn't meant for cleaver-whacking:

Fifteen minutes later and Laura was back with a cutting board, I kept whacking away at chicken limbs, and Jason set to work browning the hundreds of chunks in five frying pans of red palm oil across two stovetops, his camera slung across his shoulder like a bandolier.

Ari, our incredibly gracious host at Hostelling International, smiled wistfully as he entered the kitchen. "It's so comforting that you're making the hostel smell like palm oil!" Once you know that rich smell, something kind of at the intersection of thick lotion, paprika and mineral oil but in a good way, it's hard to forget. Turns out, we used not just the oil, but also the thick pulp rendered from crushing palm nuts. Thinned a bit with some water, and livened up with salt and chilies plus onions and garlic sauteed in the pans after browning the chicken, it all cooked up into two big pots worth of thick and very rich stew, a very stick-to-your-ribs endeavor. We also made a vegetarian version, with eggplant and zucchini and an extra dose of onions, which was arguably tastier than the chicken version.

Boeuf sauce arachide | Beef in peanut sauce | Recipe

"Goober," the folksy nickname for the peanut, comes from the Kikongo name for the groundnut, nguba. You can make a tasty peanut sauce with just about any meat, and in fact I'd intended to make it with goat but I couldn't find that in my short shopping time, so beef it was. As you can see, the list of ingredients is very simple, but the result is really satisfying and complete. I picked up some surprisingly flavorful chili powder from Mali, maybe that did the trick. Whatever the reason, there was certainly none left!

Bitekuteku | Callaloo greens | Recipe

I did a whole lot of research around this one. I wasn't relishing making yet another dish from frozen cassava greens, so I was happy to see this dish for a different type of green. But I wasn't confident I'd be able to find it fresh. I was all prepared to substitute collards or chard, but lo and behold, the produce shop across the corner from the hostel had it! It's yet another of those foods that crossed the Atlantic in the slave trade, and somehow it ended up with the name "callaloo." Anyway, I cleared them out of all 16 bunches.

Who knew how much labor callaloo requires? The stems are pretty tough, but the leaves are haphazardly arranged, so removing them takes a whole lot of labor, for which Alex and her support crew deserve particular praise. Then you have to blanch them in boiling water with baking soda, and even with two pots going at a time, that took a while. We got a head start on the timing by sauteeing the green onions and eggplant ahead of time and dropping in the greens. Happily, it was really tasty, and the big crowd made fast work of it.

Fufu | "Stiff porridge"

Practice is starting to make perfect! I'm finally starting to get the hang of it, I think. This time we used a blend of corn and cassava flours, used the big-ass paddle I bought a few months ago, and I recruited Sarah's strong arms and energy to mix it up. She stirred a small amount into the big pot of just-boiled water, then added more of alternating flours until it got kinda thick, then stirring like mad until it got really thick. (Jessica also helpfully suggested that one person hold the pot steady while another grips the paddle with both hands and uses upward motion against the side of the pot to smooth out lumps.) The fufu turned out thick enough to grab with your hands, and tasted like mostly nothing...so, success! Also, it just ran out at the end of the evening, so maybe it's dumb luck but I'm glad we made the right amount.

Pili pili | Hot sauce | Recipe

This one's even simpler than the hot sauce for Comoros. Seeded hot peppers, onion, garlic, and a bit of oil. Simmer for an hour. Done. Quite spicy, richly flavorful, crowd pleaser. I thought I was being responsible by washing my hands like 20 times after cutting all the scotch bonnets, and I'm glad I did. However, I only gave the pot a standard cleaning — and the next morning's oatmeal turned out spicy! Lesson learned. Wash everything a lot after making hot sauce.

Bananes plantains au four | Baked plantains

Fried plantains are always the tastiest. But it takes a lot of work and time and makes a royal mess, as we discovered for the Cameroonean meal. So, we got most of the fun for about 10% of the work by simply peeling the plantains, slicing them in half, and baking the off for a half hour. Thanks to the abundantly equipped kitchen, we had six trays going across three ovens! And every last plantain was gobbled up.

What made us perhaps the happiest from this meal, even beyond the beautiful space and the people who went back for thirds and the money raised, was that most people stayed far longer than they had to, making new friends around the dinner table. Having made it just about a quarter of the way through the nations of the world, it's the joy of combining adventure and community that has become so motivating!

Stay tuned for our post from Denmark!

Photos by Jason Falchook, Chrys Wu, and Laura Hadden. 

Meal 41: Côte D'Ivoire

Am I getting better at cooking African food, or is Ivorian cuisine just that good? Probably more the latter, but still, this was probably our best sub-Saharan meal yet. The flavors were so well-balanced, the spice delightful and not overwhelming, and the textures pleasant. What's more, with the exception of a few ingredients that you could probably cleverly work your way around, you can find these ingredients in a standard Western supermarket, so if you've been looking to try cooking African food, this is a good start.

Other than the New World staples like cassava and chilies which have become so common over Africa that most people probably don't know they were brought there, this meal shows essentially no European influence. Jessica, who lived in Côte D'Ivoire during high school, notes that although Ivorians are the world leaders in cacao production and also grow a lot of coffee, they consume almost none of either.

In contrast to the day before which was gross and rainy, we were blessed with amazing evening weather. Around the table were Jessica, Anthony, Miriam, Flonia, Natalie, Diana, Anna, and David.

Tilapia braisé | Grilled tilapia | Recipe: French, English translation

  The coast is so much a part of the country's identity that it's in the name! So it was only appropriate to cook some fish. I had several options available, including dorado and hogfish, but I went with tilapia because I could buy it live from a tank in Sunset Park. Doesn't get fresher than that!

As with last week's Congolese quail, the marinade was a blend of garlic, ginger, onions, and hot pepper, although this time I used a blender rather than crushing it. And also the same, this grilling style calls for cutting deep slashes in the meat to allow more of the marinade to permeate. But what's different is what comes afterwards: throwing onions and tomatoes marinated in a vinaigrette straight on the grill! As you can see from the photo I used a mesh, otherwise it would have all fallen through. It all made for a delicious mess, and I'm glad I got three fish, because it all got snapped up!

Kedjenou | Chicken and vegetable stew | Recipe

I have to admit I was a bit suspicious of the value of this stew, since it doesn't feature any ingredients you couldn't find at a Walmart with a produce section, but several sources pointed to it being a well-known Ivorian dish so I took the plunge. I did start with the heat too low, because after the prescribed hour and a half with the lid shut, the meat was still pink, but I turned it up to medium for another half hour. How rewarded we were! The flavors blended so delightfully and the chicken was really tender. Maybe the super-slow start helped?

Sauce arachide | Peanut sauce | Recipe

I swear it tasted way better than it looks, what you see here is the red palm oil having separated. This recipe comes by way of my colleague Christiaan! I found this article when I was looking for an Ivorian peanut sauce, and it turns out that he did Peace Corps there. In fact, he's something of a peanut sauce impresario, he's even hosted a cook-off! He also helped make sure that the rest of the meal seemed on-track.

I left out the chicken from this recipe since we had it in another dish, and instead upped the crushed dried shrimp. I also halved the number of peppers and fished them out partway through, in the interest of keeping it less than fiery. But it's a damn good recipe and it would go well on so many things.

Attiéké | Cassava couscous | Preparation

Another African country that doesn't just do fufu, hooray! This one's pretty distinctive, a couscous that's traditionally made by hand out of cassava. Christiaan doubted I'd find it in the states, but my little favorite African market has it in frozen three-pound balls. You could really do fine using regular couscous, but the texture would be a bit different. Also, I like the preparation as (passionately!) described in the link, including a bit of vinegar and bouillon for flavor.

Aloco | Fried plantain

It's hard to make a bad fried plantain, but apparently you can always improve. I biked a little farther than I normally go on my shopping jaunts to Sunset Park, and among dozens of produce shops found Marketa Los Fernandez. This place was narrow and crowded, and was holding its own a block from a supermarket, a very good sign. But the best part was the plantain selection: not only green and yellow, but also black! The stuff of legend! I snapped up every one I could find, cut them up in wedges as shown, fried them in red palm oil, and, well, yum. (There's supposed to be a spicy tomato-onion sauce with them, but with all the other dishes I just skipped that part.)

Mangues | Mango

Apparently dessert isn't much of a thing, so I cut up some ripe mango, and we passed the bowl around as we ate with dainty cocktail forks.

We're taking the next week off to celebrate our third wedding anniversary at the Newport Folk Festival, and when we're back it's Croatia!

Photos by Laura Hadden, who is really enjoying experiencing the wide variety of African cuisine. 

Meal 40: Congo

The larger better-known of the two countries named after the Congo River is the Democratic Republic of Congo, the former Zaire and previously a Belgian colony, but that shows up in the D's. This meal is from the north side of the river, the Republic of Congo, the former French colony, sometimes known as Congo-Brazzaville after its capital.

Anyway, as you might imagine, it's a bit tricky to find what's distinctively from this country as opposed to its cross-river sibling, both because they eat similar things and also because the similar name makes it hard to search precisely. But I managed! While this is hardly the first time we've encountered cassava leaves, this preparation takes advantage of Congo's coast and throws in fish. And for the first time we're approaching bush meat! Read on for the tasty details.

The threatened thunderstorms never arrived, and it was just a perfect evening on the deck. It was a really fun crowd, with Melvin, Pegi, Alex, Barrak, Hillary, Dan, Jessica, Beni, and Barmey trading stories for hours.

Cailles grillées au piment et au gingembre | Grilled quail with chili-ginger marinade | Recipe: French, English translation

All manner of animals are either hunted or raised in Congo, of which quail is a good example. And this marinade is a good example of the simple, straightforward, and tasty approach that so much African food shows: mash up some onions, garlic, ginger and chilies, toss in some salt and oil, and you've got yourself a marinade. By cutting slits in the meat, more flavor can get in. Then just throw them whole on the grill, turn 'em a few times, and they're really tasty. Don't be scared by the amount of chili pepper in the recipe, since it's a marinade you're only really eating a fraction of what you put in. I would definitely recommend this for even less adventurous meats like chicken; if you don't want to mash it by hand you could make a fine marinade in the blender. If you're making it with quail, just remember that each one weighs barely a quarter-pound, so think of it more as an appetizer at one apiece.

Saka-saka | Cassava leaf stew with mackerel | Recipe: French, English translation

One hazard when cooking the most "authentic" recipes is that they assume you're cooking from the same type of ingredients that you'd find on the ground. But it turns out there's a pretty big difference in cooking fresh and frozen cassava leaves, which I only realized when I found this recipe that was specifically developed for the frozen kind. Turns out you gotta cook it a heck of a lot longer!

Another great improvement over the Burundian and Central African versions of this dish is the addition of fish. These two whole mackerel did a lot for both the flavor and the texture. I also learned a novel technique for removing the bones: put the fish on top of the stew for about ten minutes to heat it up, remove it, and the meat just slides off the spine. Genius!

I did make a few variations on the recipe. The "whole bottle" of red palm oil was ambiguous, I ended up using about half the one-liter bottle I had. I also took two bits from another recipe: I sauteed the onion and garlic in the oil before adding it to the dish, and I crumbled in two little bouillon cubes (equivalent of one American-sized cube) rather than just adding salt. I left out any chilies, and instead passed around some Peri-Peri hot sauce.

Bananes plantains | Green plantains

We're cooking green plantains as starch so often that, just like the rice I also served with the meal, I'm probably going to stop calling them out at some point. But one thing I wanted to point out was advice from my mother: it's so much faster and easier to cook them in the microwave! Give it about two minutes apiece, and they're done.

Mango-ginger-lime sorbet | Recipe

A real Congolese meal would probably end in cut fruit, if anything. But I was itching to make a frozen delight, and had the ingredients on hand, so I made this sorbet. I only had two mangoes rather than the five the recipe calls for, and I tripled the ginger, added an extra lime's worth of zest, and put in some sugar water to compensate. All told, the original recipe is probably more of a crowd-pleaser, but if you like ginger and aren't afraid of bitter, try it my way! Oh, and those red things are pieces of papaya bathed in lime juice.

We're heading around the Gulf of Guinea up to Côte D'Ivoire for our next meal. Joining us for the rest of our journey is our sweet new dog Emmylou, a border collie mix who just joined our family on Friday!

Photos by Laura Hadden, who's looking forward to Emmylou's help eating table scraps.

Meal 34: Chad

Chad spans the three S's of the heart of Africa: the Sahara desert in the north, the arid Sahel in the middle, and the wetter savanna to the south. Or put into culinary terms, this extent is why we see both dates and peanuts factor into this meal.

However, on the heels of the generically-named Central African Republic, Chad's another country that poses some online searching problems, at least in English. To wit, I was looking for advice on cooking the staple grain of that country, but a search for [chad millet] turns up a doctor with that name in Louisiana. Fortunately, French provides a nice opportunity for disambiguation: they spell it Tchad, and as far as I could tell, nobody goes by that name.

Chad's going through a rough time right now: the food crisis in the Sahel has made food scarce and expensive across much of the middle of the country, and unfortunately the World Food Program is predicting a looming humanitarian disaster. They're hoping to help 1.2 million people in Chad alone — now would be an excellent time to consider helping before the situation turns from "extreme" to "famine." Our guests' generous donations tonight, after matching, will enable WFP to provide 1,000 meals.

Tonight's guests included Matt Green, a nosher with a mission: to walk every single street of New York City. Check him out! We also welcomed Matt's friend Jason, Laura's psychogeography professor Rachel and classmates Alex, Grayson, and Gabi, and Bradley and Jenny. Although Chadians are relatively big meat-eaters, we kept this meal pescatarian.

Karkanji | Hibiscus drink | Recipe (translated to English)

Along with the traditional Chadian welcome of sweet green tea, dates and peanuts (according to this page), we served this super-refreshing drink made of steeped hibiscus flowers (aka sorrel, or jamaica in Spanish). With ginger, cinnamon, and cloves, this tasted downright Christmassy. All the ingredients are so pungent that I made two batches from the same base of stuff, I just added more sugar and water and steeped it again.

Sauce koumragan | Sorrel leaf sauce | Recipe (translated to English)

I was planning on making a dish with okra, but when I happened upon bunches of sorrel at the farmer's market, I had to let fate sway me. The full-circle nature of this is just too good: use the flowers for the drink, and the leaves for the dish! I modified the recipe to be vegetarian: I upped the onions and added tomatoes in place of meat, and used porcini bouillon cubes (hey, it's what I had on hand) in place of veal bouillon. Turned out pretty tasty!

Mulukhiya | Recipe (translated to English)

Whatever goopiness we missed from skipping okra, this one made up for in abundance. This plant is sometimes known as mallow, in fact its mucilaginous properties are what they used to lean on to make marshmallows before they discovered more convenient ways to make sugar goop together in a fluffy manner. It was kind of hard to get beyond the texture because the dish itself wasn't terribly flavorful, despite the exotic smoked fish which added surprisingly little. I know we'll encounter this vegetable again as we go through Arab lands so I hope to improve on my mallowmaking.

Courgettes avec des arachides | Squash with peanuts | Recipe

Seems so simple, with nothing more than salt to flavor it, but this mix of squash (or in this case zucchini) and peanuts is really tasty: both peanuts and summer squash are mildly sweet, and the mushy and crunchy play off each other well. If you choose to make this, note that the five-to-ten-minutes for sauteeing until soft is wildly optimistic, I budgeted 20 to 30 minutes and used it all.

Boule | Millet ball | Recipe

Another African country, another fufu derivation! In Chad the staple grain is millet, though it was tough to find instruction on how to actually prepare it. I finally found this one that advised putting a little wheat flour in, and that probably helped it thicken up. Following instructions, we pressed the mush into lightly greased bowls and inverted them to eat from.

Jus de fruit | Fruit shakes | Recipe

Pretty straightforward and tasty, we made them with both mango and papaya. Even better with some rum.

Fangasso | Fluffy beignets | Recipe

A rather common name for these crispy, airy concoctions is pets de nonne, or "nun's farts." I'd never quite made anything this way before; from the initial instruction of melting butter in water it was all an unfamiliar approach, but I'll be darned, once batter hit oil, these things puffed up and got all lovely. The one modification I made was to cook them in palm oil, hopefully it was something like you'd get on the street in N'Djamena.

And that does it for our stretch of six African countries in eight meals! We take a break next weekend, followed by a trip to the Catskills where we'll cook Chile.

All photos by Laura Hadden who, after the guests went home, accidentally ate the beignet batter thinking it was boulet.