2nd Dish Goraasa be Dama from Sudan

Not sure I did this recipe justice. 

As a novice cook and especially with cooking methods I'm not used too, I’m not sure how long I should cook certain ingredients to get optimal taste. For this reason I've been sticking very closely to the cooking methods described. The problem is that when you get very little direction as I had with this dish, I'm totally lost. 

Ingredients:  

6 onions (I used med sized onions)
4 tbsp tomato paste
1/3 cup oil
3 cloves of crushed garlic
250g beef steak
3 cups water (I used about 900ml of water)
3 tomatoes
1/2 green pepper (without really thinking I added a full green pepper)
1 tsp salt
1 tsp cardamom
1 tsp cinnamon 

 

• Chop onions and put in pot and fry in oil at medium heat.  Keep covered, stirring occasionally. (Wasn't sure how long to cook the onions, so I just cooked then until light golden brown.)
• Add water and cover. (This was the second issue I had, because it also asks you to add water later. So did it want me to add all the water now and then some more later or add a bit now and the rest later. I just added all the water at once.) 
• Leaving on medium heat for 5-10 minutes until water is almost evaporated. (Because I'd added all the water it never got to this stage.)
• Lightly blend onions and return to pot and add chopped tomatoes.  
• Chop steak into small pieces and add to pot with chopped pepper, salt, cardamom and cinnamon.  
• Cover and leave for 3 minutes.  
• Add tomato paste and stir, adding water until smooth and runny.  
• Cover and leave to simmer for 10 minutes adding more water occasionally.  
• Stir in crushed garlic.

 

I'm not sure whether my dish tasted as it should taste, but what came out of the pot had no resemblance to the photograph I'd previously seem. 

I think Goraasa is a type of Chapatti like flat bread, I didn’t make any of them as we still have a lot of rice leftover from the previous night.

The dish tasted very sweet, but I think that may have been down to the onions. Also, I’m not used to adding Cinnamon to my savoury foods either so the taste was very different to what I’m used too.  

Overall I think I’d have to give it 5 out of 10, but I accept that may all be my fault and I’m sure if was cooked by an expert in Sudanese cooking it’d taste a lot nicer.

Ammo

1st Dish Poulet Nyembwe from Gabon!

Right, so it’s took a little longer than I expected but finally I’ve started my second 30 day challenge!

As I’ve mentioned previously my challenge is to cook 30 different recipes from 30 different countries in 30 days.

So Day one was yesterday 24^th Feb 2012, and the first country on my list was Gabon. (No, I’d never heard of it either before I started this challenge).

When I initially decided on this challenge I thought it’d be quite easy to find recipes from various countries around the world. What with Google and an instant access to gazillions of websites, I thought all I needed to do was simply simple search on Google and hey-presto up would pop the relevant website and off I’d go. Alas it wasn't that simple, I searched for days to find recipes for Gabon and all I could find were about three!. Luckily for me the dish I finally decided to cook turned out to be their national dish, my only hope is that my version resembles theirs.

All the ingredients are pretty easy to find apart from Nyembwe Sauce. I had no idea what this was, nor how it tasted, or even what it looked like. My first port of call was Wikipedia to see if this font of knowledge could tell me. When you type in Nyembwe it automatically directs you to Moambe, and here is what it says about Moambe; “Moambe, mwambe, Nyembwe, palm butter, or palm cream is the name of a sauce or a dish prepared with a sauce usually made from the pericarp (not the seeds) of palm nuts, the fruit of the African oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) tree, in western Middle Africa.”

None the wiser I took the whole list of names to a newly opened African shop in Doncaster town centre new the town Library and asked for Moambe, luckily they had heard of it but were out of stock. I knew I was heading for Birmingham a few days later so I thought I’d try my luck there, unfortunately the only African shop I could find on Google was shut when I got there. It was a case of then waiting for the shop in town to restock Moambe, which they had when I returned yesterday. 

This is what Moambe looks like. 

To turn this concentrate into a sauce, all you need to do is 1 part of this paste to 2 parts of water and then boil for 20 mins. 

So all I did was 500ml water and added this to make the volume to 750ml. worked quite well. (I think)

Poulet Nyembwe Ingredients:

1 Chicken, cut into serving pieces (I used three chicken breasts)

1 Onion, finely chopped

1 Ripe tomato, chopped

20 Okra, chopped (I only used 15)

2 Garlic cloves, finely chopped

1 hot Chilli, chopped

Salt, Black Pepper and Cayenne Pepper to taste. (I used 2tsp salt, Lrg pinch Pepper and 1 tsp Cayenne Pepper. Maybe I needed just a tad more salt but I just added that at the table)

500ml Nyembwe Sauce

Oil for frying

Serves about 5/6 people depending on your appetite

Method:

Fry the Chicken and all the other ingredients apart from the spices and Nyembwe sauce in a large frying pan until the chicken has browned on all sides.

Reduce the heat then add the spices, 250ml of water and 500ml of the Nyembwe sauce.

Simmer on low heat for about an hour, or until all the ingredients have softened. Stir before serving to re-incorporate the palm oil then serve with Baton de Manioc (not sure what this is), FuFu (again not sure what this is) or rice.

The cooking process is very different to what I’m used to. With Indian cooking we normally tend to fry the onions until golden brown, then add garlic and chillies, then add tomatoes as well as other herbs and spices. Once everything is cooked thoroughly then add the chicken. So putting everything in the pot apart from the dry spices felt very strange to me. But I had decided to be as authentic to the traditional recipe as possible. 

Only one thing I noticed that was different from the pictures I’d seen on the website I took this recipe from was the colour; mine looked a lot more brown, theirs was more red. But I think that may have been down to me not using Palm oil. I instead used butter for my initially frying. 

I wasn’t too sure how this was going to taste so I didn’t make too much of it, but overall it wasn’t too bad. The average score from my family was about 6 out of 10. Personally I thought it deserved a little higher score but I’ll accept majority verdict. 

Ammo

You learn something new everyday!

People use different web browsers to do all their online bidding, my personal preference is Mozilla Firefox. Not sure why I shared that with you, just a random thought!

On Firefox I’ve been able to set up homepage to http://www.google.co.uk/ and when you open this up you get a host of different information that may or may not be of use to you.  

Normally I usually have a quick glance at the latest headlines before opening up web pages that I need, (usually Twitter & Facebook). Anyway today I decided to explore the home page a little more closely and this lead me to an unusual discovery.

On the left hand side of the home page is a list of web links; all pretty straight forward so far, I first checked the weather it’s hot in Doncaster 9°C!! I then clicked on Wikipedia link and it leads me to the most wonderful discovery.

The first thing I noticed when I clicked on the Wikipedia link was the ‘recently updated’ links. Looking down the list of topics that had changed I noticed a link to “List of countries by population” http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_countries_by_population&diff=477498769&oldid=477494658.

 

Everyone knows the country with the largest population is China with 1,339,724,852 inhabitants but who can tell me the country with the smallest population?

It is in fact the Pitcairn Islands with 67 inhabitants.

No, that wasn’t a typo there is only 67 people on the entire Island! I then decided to see where this island is situated, so out came Google Earth and very soon I discovered that it isn’t just a single island but in fact four separate islands located about half way between Australia and South America.

But here’s the interesting bit, it’s the Island where the mutineers of the Bounty settled!

 The story goes something like this.

The islands were first discovered in 1767, but marine chronometer weren’t in regular use so the Islands’ location was plotted incorrectly. They were chartered as being 25° 2’ south and 133° 21’ west of Greenwich. The actually coordinates are 25° 04’ south and 130° 06 west. This clearly made the Islands very difficult to find.

 The Bounty spotted the Islands on their way to Tahiti and plotted its actual location and knowing that the Islands would be hard to find allowed the mutineers to escape the British Navy and settle there.

The ship Bounty was set on fire and sunk and is still visible to this day.

The descendents of four of the original settlers still live on the island to this day, Christian, Warren, Young, and Brown.

I’ve now added this to my must visit before I die list of locations.

Ammo