No. 34 - Do a twirl and Cameroon to yourself!

Q: “What do you do before you come 'round to yourself?"

A: "You do a twirl.”

         One of the Johns, Volvo Ocean Races, 2012.

Ndole (aren’t we all)

Ndole is a Cameroonian stew that consists of nuts, ndoleh (a bitterleaf native to Cameroon) and either fish, prawns or ground beef.

(O)n(the)dole shligo shtyle, is more like a schcutt of peanut butter (not the shaweet schtuff), shhpinach and prawns plus shtock, all shhlaaaped together. Savage.

For a real Shligo rant visit http://www.oddsocksrevival.com/

Serves 2                                                                                                                                    6/10

1 bag of baby spinach (240g), chopped

raw prawns, deveined and shelled, as many as you can afford on the ndole.

some stock made from simmering the prawn shells in water (optional)

3 tbsp of posh natural peanut butter (no added sugar or salt)

1 small red onion chopped

1 tbsp fresh ginger, grated

1 clove of garlic, crushed

3 regular tomatoes, chopped

bit of oil, salt and pepper.

To serve: rice and plantain

Saute the onion, garlic and ginger until soft. Add the chopped tomatoes and simmer for a few johns. 

Add the peanut butter and a few splashes of prawn stock or water to loosen it up a bit. Bring to a simmer again. Throw in the spinach (you might need to add it a bit at a time). 

In a seperate pan, fry the prawns until just cooked.  You can mix the cooked prawns into the ndole or serve them on top with some rice and fried plantain.

Dat troot, yo.

33. - Cambodia - Fish Amok and UFO's

amok  (əˈmʌk, əˈmɒk, əˈmʌk)

— n

1.                  a state of murderous frenzy

— adv

2.                  run amok  to run about with or as if with a frenzied desire to kill

                                                                                                                                      Collins Dictionary

While shopping for the ingredients for this, I was swiftly reminded that I stick out like a blonde in an Asian food store. Too often I don’t know how to find the food on the shelves, what it should look, taste or smells like. Sometimes I can’t even pronounce it.

During my recent re-encounter/reunion with the ethnic food store I was looking for ‘galangal’. Google tells me that it’s a member of the ginger family. I could see nothing that looked like a relative but took a guess and picked up two UFO’s  (Unidentified Food Objects). Below are both specimens, neither of which I actually believe is galangal, both of which I put into the curry paste. I’m just that bad ass.  

I had trouble getting the banana leaves too and found the last (gone off) ones in Dublin. I am not a talented Cambodian banana bowl maker. My banana bowls were bowls in spirit but not in function.

Fish Amok                                                                                                                             Rating: 7/10

Like being hit between the eyes with lemongrass, being kicked in the teeth with ginger and slapped in the face with a great big lime leaf. Curry paste so intensely flavoured it made my eyes water. Next time I’d lay off the lemongrass a bit. I can still taste it.

Serves 2

Curry Paste or Kroeung

­2 fresh chillies, seeds left in

8 cloves of garlic

1 red onion

1 tsp tumeric powder

4 sticks of lemongrass

Chunk of UFO specimen A

Chunk of UFO specimen B

Chunk of ginger

6 lime leaves

(1 tbsp shrimp paste, I couldn’t find this anywhere and left it out)

A few glugs of oil

The Rest (Amok)

2 fillets of hake, skin removed

can of coconut milk

tbsp sugar

1 tbsp fish sauce

2 eggs

Banana Bowl

2 banana leaves

cocktail sticks

fresh red chilli and lime leaves to garnish

Roughly chop and blend all the curry paste ingredients in a blender. Fry the curry paste in a little oil for about five minutes. Add the coconut oil, sugar, fish paste and simmer for a further ten minutes or so (it tastes better than it looks). Leave to chill.  

While this is chillin you can make the banana bowls. (Or not. You can screw the banana bowls and just use a normal bowls). Make them anyway you can. I cannot give advice on this beyond fold up the corners, thread with cocktail sticks and keep your fingers crossed. I made an external tinfoil bowl as backup. I advise you do the same.

Dice the fish into bite sized pieces. Once the coconut mixture is cool beat in the eggs and mix in the fish. Divide into the banana bowls (or normal bowls), and steam for 20-25 minutes until the amok has just set. Coat the fish skin in some seasoned flour and fry in some oil until crispy. Chop and scatter on the amok with some sliced fresh red chilli and lime leaves. Serve with steamed rice and eat with chopsticks (even if the Cambodians don’t.) 

No. 31 - Burkina Faso Sleep!

Riz gras I can hardly remember, due to college related sleep deprivation, and cider induced, (lets call it) tipsiness. Not only did I have to worry about not poisoning myself but six others, including the guests of honor, Claire Gillan and Mark Conway (for some reason I feel full names are necessary here). And for their welcome home feast from lands far far away, they were presented with none other than the showstopper riz gras, a.k.a chicken and rice. A humble side dish maybe, but I simply did not have the cognitive skills to achieve anything more accomplished. Even still, I left out a vital ingredient and lost and my camera in the spices drawer.

I remember better, the next day having riz gras for breakfast, lunch and dinner asian style, dashed with soya and sweet chili sauce. The perfect hangover food. Trice.

Serves 6                                                                                     Rating: ⁵/₁₀

6 chicken breasts, cut into cubes

500g rice

1 vegetable stock cube

5 cloves of garlic, chopped

3 hot chilies

1 onion, chopped

4 tomatoes, chopped

4tbsp tomato puree (I forgot this)

salt, pepper and oil for frying

The following is how I think it went.

Chop up the chilies, garlic, tomatoes and onion until very fine. Fry in a large pan for a few minutes. Add the chicken, a little water and continue to simmer until the chicken is cooked through.

Stir in the tomato puree and stock cube. Add the rice, one litre of recently boiled water and simmer until the rice is tender and the water is absorbed.

Serve immediately with finely sliced red onion.

No. 28 - Cool Beans in Brazil!

This entry is going to be very short. I will not ramble. I am in the process of moving flat and so have many more important things to be doing than divulging the culinary attributes of Brazil. However I did make this nearly two weeks ago and I thought that if I don’t post this now, I’ll have forgotten what it tastes like, not to mention what I put in it.

This is a very loose interpretation of a Feijoada, or Brazilian Black Bean Stew.

Feijoada

In short, a sausage chili con carne made with black beans and without the chili. A fair description I think.

Note: I was yet again in Sligo for this one, making my parents fund the extensive shopping list once more and so I couldn’t get my hands on any dried black beans, or even tinned black beans for that matter, so I opted for (forgive me Brazil) black bean sauce - of the Chinese variety. Somebody should take away my right to have a food blog right now! I am terribly ashamed but it’s the closest I could get. To make up for my shortcomings, I also threw in some tinned mixed beans, I think there were kidney beans, pinto beans, probably some other beans and who knows? There may have even been some black beans in there too.

Warning: Vegetarians look away now.

Serves 8 - 10

1 large smoked sausage, say 500g, sliced

chorizo, 300g, sliced

300g Irish sausages, cooked and sliced

a few gammon steaks, sliced

any other meat you fancy, the more the merrier

1 large onion, sliced

a few cloves of garlic, chopped

1 tin of tomatoes

3 tins of mixed beans

1 large jar of black bean sauce

salt and pepper, to taste

Sauté the onion and garlic in some olive oil and then add all of the meat, beans, black bean sauce, and anything else I may have forgotten that is mentioned above. Stew for a couple of hours and serve with rice. And there you a have it, my woeful attempt at Feijoada and any carnivores wet dream.

          

No. 27 - Botswana lick the plate!

Botswana, another country that’s fun to say in a Sligo accent.

Another day, another stew. This time potjiekos, which is a Botswanian stew, cooked on a three-legged cast iron pot over an outdoor fire. Literally translated ‘pojiekos’ means ‘pot food’ and is pronounced poy-key-cos. Luckily enough, there happened to be one of these pots lying around the house that my Granny P. picked up somewhere. It’s rarely used and so this seemed like the perfect opportunity to get back to our African roots, light a fire and cook some good old-fashioned ‘pot food’.

I can imagine the women in Botswana, hunched and sweating over their potjiekos, the sun blazing down on their backs. Being in Ireland, it was of course raining. Being Irish, we didn’t let a little rain stop us and got a little turf fire lit (not very African) and the potjiekos on the go. The African Gods were obviously impressed by our potjiekos making perseverance because the rain stopped, and low and behold - the perfect African sunset.

Groundnut Potjiekos

I’m getting the feeling they have a thing for peanuts in Africa, which is fine by me because I love peanut butter. This stew quite obviously tastes of peanuts if you know they’re in there. If not, you might not be able to put your finger on it or wouldn’t know unless someone told you - and then after you’d be kicking yourself for not figuring it out.

The first mutterings over the dinner table were proclamations that it was “unusual”, which we all know is generally a bad sign. However everyone agreed that it improved with every mouthful and in the end it was so incredibly moreish, it was difficult to stop and we nearly licked the plates.

Serves 4 – 6

6 chicken legs

a little oil for frying

1 red pepper, diced

3 cups of water

2/3 jar of peanut butter

a piece of ginger, grated

2 tbsp brown sugar

120g tomato puree

1 tsp cayenne pepper

(Get a fire started outside. Anything will do, coal, wood, turf, whatever)

Prepare the sauce first. Whisk together the peanut butter, tomato puree, ginger, brown sugar, cayenne pepper and the water. Set aside.

 

Put your pot above the fire, heat your oil and fry the peppers and onion for a few minutes. Then add the chicken and brown on all sides. Cover with the peanut sauce and let simmer for roughly an hour. Serve with rice balls and some hot sauce (this time hot sauce is legitimate because the particular one we used was from South Africa (not that we ever need an excuse). Rice balls are just mashed rice rolled into balls. Careful not to burn your hands, although I can’t really see any way around it.

No. 16 - Bahrain and the Night of the Chicken Machboos!

Another home-house rendition of Culinisation. This time Bahrain brought together my family and the so-called WAG’s, who made the journey to Sligo last weekend for Buckfest 2011. On the night of the Chicken Machboos, the wine was certainly flowing. There was wine, emergency wine and then, emergency wine and beer for the emergency wine. Somewhere into the emergency wine for the emergency wine, as we sat huddled under blankets outside my house, we spotted a UFO (an unidentified fixed object). It was down by the water and it glowed with a grey/whitish light that suddenly went out. After some squeals and hand grasping, we noticed that the silhouette could still be seen, jutting up into the horizon. It’s difficult to say how much time passed before we plucked up the courage to, armed with our t-light lanterns, take a closer look.

I managed, against the girl’s better judgment, to wade through the sand, sludge and stones to discover what was, of course, a tree. This still doesn’t explain the light though. Da troot is still out there.

Chicken Machboos

Chicken Machboos (chicken and rice) has all the ingredients of a curry (every spice under the sun and some), yet its flavors are far more subtle. You can taste all of the spices because there is little or no heat to overpower them. I shouldn’t even call it a curry of course. If it’s a curry that you want, this is not it. If you crave fire, extinguished with an ice-cold beer, wait couple of days until Bangladesh. If you are sick of ordering curry’s that make you sweat buckets, eyes water and you can’t understand why anyone would ever endure such a burning pain for every mouthful, go with the Machboos.

Machboos is really simple to make and is essentially a heatless curry that has rice cooked in it, kind of like a biryani. Like with all of these eastern countries, you need a stocked spice rack, but if you don’t already have one, I would recommend going out and buy one of everything. You may think, what is the point in buying a certain spice when a recipe only requires a tiny amount? Trust me, if you buy them, you’ll use them for everything. Another perk is you’ll be able to make a variety of dishes in the future without having to buy many ingredients. All I needed to buy for this was chicken and some coriander. Not bad. You’ve got to love a one pot wonder too.

Another ingredient this recipe requires is buharat spice mix, which is unique to Bahrain. Turns out I went through the mix, and the ingredients in a buharat spice mix are spice for spice the exact same as your good old curry powder. This is one spice I wouldn’t bother buying especially for this dish.

Serves 5

5 chicken legs, cut into drumsticks and thighs

3 onions, finely chopped

enough curry powder to marinade the chicken

1 chilli, deseeded and chopped

a chunk of ginger, chopped

1 tsp. cumin

½ tsp. cinnamon

2 cardamon pods, whole

1 ½ tsp. turmeric

2 ½  cups of long grain rice

1 tin of chopped tomatoes

salt

5 cups of water or chicken stock. (I just threw in a stock cube)

juice of ½ lemon

oil for frying

lemon wedges to serve

coriander leaves to serve

In a large bowl, cover the chicken pieces with curry powder. Fry the chicken in a deep saucepan until browned on all sides and set aside. Fry the onion, ginger and chili in the remaining oil with all of the additional spices for a couple of minutes. Return the chicken to the pan with a tin of chopped tomatoes and a cup of the chicken stock or water. Simmer for 45 minutes over a low heat until the chicken is cooked.

Add the rice and remaining chicken stock or water to the pan and simmer until the rice is cooked. Stir in the juice of half a lemon. Serve with coriander, lemon wedges and chutney. Yum.

No. 14 - Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azerbaijan!

Bidding farewell and good riddance to the A’s we finish up running scared from Azerbaijan.*

This meal was relatively uneventful and passed without any particularly mentionable anecdotes. Apart from maybe Ronan, my most helpful helper turning up just in time to help with the tasting of these little unpronounceable yarpag dolmasy’s. Use of vine leaves in this recipe, means yet another opened jar in the back of the fridge that I won’t ever use again but can’t bear to throw out. There is a chance I would finish them off if I didn’t have so many other unusual ingredients to buy and waste half of. So ya, that’s about as exciting as it gets I’m afraid.

*running scared was the winning Eurovision song this year by the way, in case my brilliant wit was undeterred by anyone. It also ties in with running scared from Azkaban - I think I'm on a role here. 

Yarpag dolmasy’s

I halved the (altered) recipe to serve two (and a half) people. You could probably add more rice if you wanted to bulk it up a bit - they were pleasantly and surprisingly meaty. Halved, tinned chickpeas are an additional option. Opening a can of chickpeas for a mere tablespoon or so didn’t seem worth it to me, but if you already have them open in the back of the fridge, why not? The vine leaves were jarred in brine and had a slightly pickled taste before they were rinsed. Afterwards they had the tang of black olives.

Yarpag dolmasy’s are tasty little mouthfuls and they really grow on you, different but in a good way – I think maybe it’s the cinnamon. Wrapping the meat in the vine leaf parcel and lining them in neat concentric circles in a saucepan is highly satisfying, at least for me anyway. They’re cooked for an hour and a half and then – loaded with garlicky yogurt, they’re gone in a mouthful.

1 bundle of vine leaves, rinsed and separated in cold water

250g of minced beef

1 small red onion, chopped finely

¼ tsp turmeric

¼ cinnamon

a handful of chopped parsley

2 tbsp of rice, rinsed in cold water

40g of butter, room temperature

salt and pepper

Garlic Yoghurt

5 heaped tbsp of greek yogurt

½ clove of garlic, minced

salt

Mix all of the ingredients except the vine leaves in a bowl with your hands to ensure everything is evenly distributed. Lay out the vine leaves on a work surface and place a dollop meat mixture in the centre. Fold the leave over and over again, to create a little round parcel (the circular shape is unique to Azerbaijan). Line a saucepan with the parcels and layer them up on top of one another. Place a plate in the pan with a heavy weight on top, this stops the parcels from unraveling, Cover with water up until the plate and simmer for an hour and a half.

Remove with a slotted spoon and serve with greek yogurt mixed with half a clove of minced garlic and some salt. Add a green salad, crusty bread and a punnet of ripe cherry tomatoes and you’re sorted.

No.6 – Thrilla in Anguilla!

When Oddsocks Revival impromptly returned from the Enniscorthy Strawberry Festival, what was originally intended to be a simple pigeon-peas and rice dinner (which would have been extremely boring and bland), became delicious shrimps in a coconut sauce with pigeon-peas and rice. If the boys had returned to only rice and beans my reputation would have been fleeting and so, Teresa and I headed out late that evening in the still ridiculous heat to find some fresh shrimp and plenty of limes for the eagerly anticipated mojitos.

Two hours and zero mojitos later we were still beheading, tailing and deveining our kilo of shrimp, a less than pleasant job poor T had not signed up for.  I for the first time understood why people just buy them already prepared and swore never to buy shrimp whole again. This was until I learned the absolute joy of the stock made from simmering the shells. Turns out there is more flavor in one shell than in the flesh of a million shrimp (a slight exaggeration maybe) so if you are going to the trouble of buying them whole, for Gods sake make a stock. I literally could not believe how delicious it was and mixed with coconut milk - I could have, and truth be told did, eat it with a spoon.

Apologies for the lack of photos and the hilarity of the photos that were taken. (I got a little carried away with being masterchefy, hence the ridiculous tower of rice, which took no more than two attempts!) I blame the booze for my temporary insanity.

Pigeon-peas and Rice (or Black-eyed Beans and Rice)

The national dish of Anguilla is pigeon peas and rice - I must stress that this is pigeon-dash-peas and rice and not pigeon and peas and rice! I however couldn’t get my hands on any pigeon-peas but had read that you can substitute them with black-eyed peas. When overcome with a billion types of peas and beans in the ethnic food store, I of course, mistook black-eyed peas for black-eyed beans and so, in reality the dish below is black-eyed beans and rice and not pigeon-peas and rice - my mistake on many accounts. This is not the most exciting dish. Rice and beans is after all just rice and beans.

Serves 8

1 onion, chopped

3 rashers of bacon, chopped

2 cloves of garlic, minced

1 tsp ground cumin

400g black eyed beans, presoaked for an hour (obviously use pigeon peas if you can)

400g rice

4 or 5 spring onions, sliced

a couple of sprigs of fresh thyme

bunch of parsley, chopped

salt and pepper

olive oil

Throw away the water that the beans were soaked in and simmer until the beans are tender. Roughly forty minutes or so but you just have to keep tasting them. I also skimmed off the scum.

Cook the rice as you would normally.

Fry the onion, garlic and bacon in a little oil for about ten minutes. Then throw in the cooked rice and cooked beans, cumin, spring onions, the leaves of the sprigs of thyme, parsley and season with salt and pepper and mix the whole shebang together.  And there you have it – beans and rice.

Coconut Shrimp

This is one for the shellfish lovers. It took more effort to deshell the shrimps than I would have like, but if you have the patience and aren’t too squeamish about brains and intestines etc. and love seafood this is worth giving a go. It is intensely shellfishy even before you add the actual shrimps.  Beware: this will not work if you don’t make your own stock so if you are considering using prepared frozen prawns – don’t. If I were doing this again I would just serve it with plain rice and a simple salad. Yum!

Serves 6

I kg of shrimp, whole

juice of 1 lime

2 cloves of garlic, minced

1 red bell pepper, cubed

2 onions, thinly sliced

½ can of chopped tomatoes

1 and ½ cans of unsweetened coconut milk

1 tsp cornflour

 a few spring onions, sliced

some chopped parsley

                                

Peel and devein your shrimp. Put the shrimp in one bowl squeeze of the juice of a lime. Set aside. Put the shells in a saucepan, cover with about four cups of water and simmer for 20 minutes. The shells go an illluminous pink colour and so does the water. It starts smelling seriously seafoody.  Sieve the stock and discard the shells.

                                  

Fry up the peppers, onion and garlic until soft. Next simply throw in the coconut milk, tinned tomatoes, about half the shrimp stock (or as much as you like really) and stir in the cornflour. Leave to simmer for about ten minutes or until you get the desired consistency which I would describe as like a seafood chowder. Next add the shrimp and just wait until they have turned pinky – literally 2 minutes. Garnish with the spring onions and parsley ( I forgot this for the photos) and serve with a bottle of seriously hot sauce!