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Love,

Sasa

When Grown Men Cry

Ma Kaduna is gone, may her soul rest in peace.

Before Bey, there was Ma Kaduna, the first true independent woman. 

A true definition of a feminist that taught me to demand what was rightfully mine. She taught me what it means to be a hustler. A very bold and audacious lady who rode her motorbike about Lokoja town like she was giving the world the finger while dressed in her cute nurses uniform, in a world where women were expected to sit at home and make babies. But she did have babies, 8 of them! My mum being one of them.

She spoke more than five local Nigerian languages including English. She felt it was necessary for people to be insulted and abused in their own language so there will be no misunderstanding. A true terrorist to her family, a real force to reckon with. 

She taught me to add sweet potato to my yam porridge to give it a sugar like taste while using the wooden spoon to hit my hand as I reached into the pot to pick out a string of dried fish staring deliciously at me.  

I will miss you. I miss you.

Sweet Potato Porridge

Ingredients:

500g of sweet potato, cut into big chunks

1 cup of spinach

2 medium tomatoes

1 red bell pepper

1 tbs of flaked chilli

1 tsp of garlic

1 tsp of ginger

3 beef franks, thinly sliced

½ medium onion, sliced

3 tbs sunflower oil

2 Knorr cubes

salt to taste

1 tsp of thyme

Method:

Blend the tomatoes and bell pepper in a food processor. In the mean time grill the sliced franks for about five minutes in the open. Heat the oil in a large sauce pan for 3 minutes and pour in the blended mixture. Fry for about seven minutes then add the chilli, Knorr cubes, garlic, ginger and  thyme.  Add the chunks of sweet potato and onions and combine thoroughly. Add enough water just to cover the potatoes and leave to cook for 10 minutes. Add the spinach and cook until the potatoes are soft.  Take the pan off the heat and toss in the grilled franks and add salt to taste.

Kitchen Hacks 1 - Saving Time With a Chopper

Welcome to the first of my kitchen hacks. In this section I will share tips on the little things that make my life easier in the kitchen.

Today's kitchen hack is about bulk chopping food produce like garlic and ginger, ingredients I use almost every day, and preserving it in oil in the fridge for later use. I also use this method for okra and leeks. I chop loads and freeze and use when I need to. This saves time and money as I don't have to throw away any produce because they have gone off.

Step 1 - Choose your chopper. There is a chopper that comes with most blender, the chopper blade is usually like a straight thin blade. There are also some sophisticated ones by brands like Philips, Breville, Kenwood etc. These are really good and will chop more of your produce than the standard ones. However they are more expensive. For this tip the standard one is used.

Step 2 - Fill only ⅓ of the cup with your choice of produce. If the cup is too full, you will end up a very fine paste as well as huge chucks. You want the final result to look like you used a knife to chop it yourself.

Step 3 - Use the "P" setting on the blender as demonstrated. This is what gives the desired effect.

Step 4 - Pour the chopped produce into a sterilised jar or freezer bag if you are intending to freeze.

Step 5 - To preserve it in the fridge add olive oil to the jar. Without this your chopped item will go off.

Easy as ABC...

Plantain Chronicles II

Educating ones self is a continuous process. Today's recipe is a modification of the recipe in the first Plantain Chronicles. The difference is using panko crumbs to coat the plantain balls.

Panko crumbs is something I always felt was posh and never found in my local grocer here in Doha. Today I decided it was high time I made mine. 

Panko Crumbs

Ingredients:

4 slices of day old white bread, crust removed and cut into small squares

Method:

Preheat the oven to 200 oC. Blend the crumbs in a blender using the pulse function until all the bread has been shredded. Avoid making fine crumbs.

Place the crumbs in a flat oven tray and toast for about 4 minutes. Shake the tray after 2 minutes to make sure all sides of the crumbs are toasted. 

Plantain Balls with Panko Crust

Ingredients:

1 very ripe Plantains

1 tbs crushed chill

1 Knorr Cube

3 tbs of plain flour

3 tbs of fine breadcrumbs
1 cup of flour, for coating
2 eggs, beaten, for coating
1 cup of Panko crumbs, for coating
½ cup of grated Parmesan 

stuffing of your choice e.g. boiled egg, cheese, prawns

Method:

Mash the plantain until there are no lumps and mix in the chill and knorr. Add the flour and breadcrumbs and combine thoroughly. What you want in a thick dough that would hold so you may need to add more flour. Using the boiled egg as the stuffing, fold the plantain dough around the egg, cover the whole egg. For other types of stuffing mentioned, flatten a table spoon of plantain dough in your palm, place stuffing prawn in the centre and fold into a ball.

Place one stuffed plantain ball in a bowl of flour and coat it thoroughly with flour, dust off the excess. Return the flour coated ball in to the a bowl containing beaten eggs and then lastly coat with the panko crumbs combined with the Parmesan.

Repeat this for the rest of the stuffed balls. Deep fry them until they are golden brown and crunchy. Enjoy with sauce of your choice.

Peppered Meat

Ingredients:

500g of beef, cut into cubes

½ red bell pepper

½ green bell pepper

½ medium onion, thinly slice half of this 

1 Knorr cube

1 tsp of thyme

½ tsp of curry powder

½ tsp of coriander powder

1 tbs of crushed chili

3 tbs of oil

salt to taste

Method:

Preheat the oven to 400 oF.

In a bowl mix the beef, Knorr, thyme and curry and one table spoon of oil thoroughly so that the meat is well coated with the spices. Spread the spiced meat on a baking tray in a single layer and bake in the oven for about 15 minutes or until brown.

In the meantime, coarsely blend the bell peppers and 1/4 onion. The mixture shouldn't be smooth, you are after a grainy mixture. Heat the remaining oil in a medium pan and the fry the mixture with coriander powder until all the liquid has dried up. Add the spiced meat and mix to so that the meat is well coated with the sauce. Take it off the heat, add the sliced onion and serve.

The Plantain Chronicles!

I have always loved plantains but the current love I have for them has taken me by surprise. The past few days, I have found myself in the kitchen in the middle of the night creating recipes using plantains as the main ingredients. I blame 9jafoodie! I have been trying recreate her plantain chips recipe but something always went wrong. I can't manage to find unripe plantain in Doha. And when I do get one that in reasonably close, I can't find a way to cut them so thin. I am rubbish with the mandolin. So I decided to make plantain chips my own way.

I have developed two recipes with the same ingredients, I must admit that one of them happened by mistake! 

Plantain Chips and Puffs

Ingredients:

½ ripe plantain, small cubes
1  tbs plain flour
3 tbs dry fine breadcrumbs
½ tsp chili powder
a pitch of salt
vegetable oil fir frying

Directions:

using a hand blender, blend the plantain in a bowl until smooth. Add all the other ingredients and combine well, it the dough is too wet you can add more bread crumbs. You want to be able to roll the dough out without sticking to the pin. Divide the dough into two, one for plantain chips and the other half for plantain puffs. 

using a rolling pin, flatten half of the dough until its about as thick as a 2 pence coin and the other half should be flattened until it's about thick as 1 ½ of a 2 pence coin. Heat the oil in a medium pan and fry the chips and puffs for about 3 mins or until golden brown.

Serve with pepper sauce.

A Hungry Man...

What is it they say about hungry people again? 

A meal in my home is never a simple thing. Simple rice and stew could take longer than usual because once I enter the kitchen my brain starts to wonder what else I could do to make this simple dish extraordinary. This afternoon though was the wrongest time for me to experiment because AF was hungry. I mean H-U-N-G-R-Y!

I opened the fridge to get out the stew and check if there was any cooked rice left. That's when I noticed the very ripe plantains. I knew that if I didn't cook them then they will end up in the bin. That wasn't going to happen as I had to travel very far to buy them. I thought of the fuel I used up during that journey, ah!

However what  I was planning to do was serious risky business as I had a very hungry man waiting. I quickly put the rice to boil and set out to prepare something with the plantain. I wasn't going to fry them as they had gone past that stage. I suddenly remembered some food porn I had seen on Kitchen Butterfly's instagram page. It inspired me to create my own. She used a ricer to mash up the plantain. I didn't have one of those so I quickly chopped the plantains and as I was adding the other ingredients, I remembered that a cheese grater, the type you insert the cheese in a compartment and rotate the wheel against the actual grater. This would work perfectly.

By the time I had mixed the dough, Af had come into the kitchen twice to ask if I went to the farm to get the rice. I heard him pacing up and down the living room and at one point I heard screams. I ran to the living room to find out what was going on only for me discover he had lost in some game he was playing on his iPad. I knew then I was playing with fire. I quickly served him the rice and stew without the plantain meal, he can have that as a savoury dessert!

Plantain Stuffed Balls

Ingredients:

2 very ripe Plantains

1 tbs crushed chill

2 tbs honey roasted almonds

1 knorr Cube

5 tbs of plain flour

3 tbs of fine breadcrumbs

1 cup of medium sized prawns

Method:

mash the plantain until there are no lumps and mix in the chill, almonds and knorr. Add the flour and breadcrumbs and Combine thoroughly. What you want in a thick dough that would hold so you may need to add more flour. Flatten a table spoon of plantain dough in your palm, place one prawn in the centre and fold into a ball. Do this until you run out of dough. Deep fry them until they are golden brown and crunchy.

Sasa's Kitchen Against GMO - You Should Be Too

I bought some beans from my usual grocer the other day. I was excited because I had been dreaming of moin-moin and beans porridge and dodo (fried plantain). I soaked the beans for a whole day and cooked for another 6 hours but still inedible. I had to check the packet again to make sure I hadn't bought beads! 

In the end I chucked it all out and went with something I thought would work - Lentils. Part of the beans family, right? It worked very well. Follow this recipe but omit the step about peeling the beans. Serve with chicken suya and salad.

The inedible beads, sorry beans got me thinking about some "noise" being made back home in Nigeria right now about the introduction of GMO and I thought I better add my two cents to the matter.

My very good friend Patrick has written extensively about this issue here and the ever gorgeous Ify has highlighted health issues with respect to GMOs here. Please take some time to read these articles.

The minister of Agriculture has responded to all the noise, claiming that there are no GMOs in Nigeria only "biotechnical" seeds. He claims that there is a difference between biotechnology and GMOs. If you go to the Monsanto's website (the largest producers of GMOs) they proudly say they are a biotechnology company helping farmers increase their yield. And Monsanto's representatives have been seen doing "business".

I feel that even if GMOs are a good thing, we don't need them in Nigeria. We have fertile land. All we need is for the government to support and help with mechanised farming. We have so much potential and haven't exhausted all the options. For example, flood resistance seeds have been introduced in Kwara state.  It doesn't make sense to use flood resistance seeds when the cause of the flood is man made. Fix the damn dam! 

When a girl brings a guy home and introduces him to her parents, the parents investigate the guy and his family. We need to take that approach with regards to GMOs and do our homework. There has been a lot of news about GMOs around the world. Many western countries are rejecting GMOs even poor countries that have no food. There have been many suicide cases reported in India due to failing GMO seeds. We need to ask questions, investigate. We need to conduct tests and then decide with the support of the whole nation if this is the way to go.

Making the Undesirable Desirable

Have you guys seen the movie Between Us? It is a really good insightful movie (don't mind the critics). You should watch it, there are many lessons to be learnt from the movie.

After watching the movie last night, AF and I started to discuss aspects of the movie and called on our past experiences as examples. There were two lessons we agreed on 1) without opportunity, handwork can be worth nothing 2) to succeed in life, to achieve your goals, you have to make the undesirable desirable.

Lesson 1: AF said I have never beaten him in word with friends, ever! i was shocked because that's a big fat lie. however i didn't have any evidence because i had played so many times and the app only stores so many games. The only way i could prove this was not true was to play another game with him and win. Good plan right? Great plan!

Anyway for hours I was leading by at least 50 points. I remained focused, thought things through before I placed my tiles. I worked damn hard at that game. When there were only about 6 tiles left in the bag my dearest husband played a four-letter word and scored 70 points and blew me out! I have refused to finish that game. He has been nudging me all day to play, I just can't deal. Hiss!

Lesson 2: We all have dreams of doing something special with our lives. for some people this comes easily but for others, they will have to navigate their lives down a different route to achieve that dream, that goal. The first step is to be realistic about our goals and dreams and the next step is to do what ever it takes to achieve that realistic goal. This can some times mean you have to do what you don't like.   The trick is to keep your eye on that goal and make the undesirable desirable. 

When you watch the movie please let me know what you think. Do agree on the lessons learnt?

Speaking of undesirable things, AF decided last week he liked brown rice. Heaven save me! As i don't have the energy to cook two different pots of rice I came up with a recipe that allows me to enjoy the brown rice.

Ingredients:

2 cups of brown basmati rice

1 medium onion, sliced

1 tsp of whole coriander

1 tsp of whole black peppercorns

1 tsp of dry mustard seeds

1 tsp of cumin seeds 

2 tbs of sunflower oil

Water

Method:

Wash the rice and soak in hot water for about 30 minutes, drain and keep aside. Heat the oil in a pan and fry the onions until they are soft on medium heat, fry for about 3 minutes. Remove the onion from the pan and keep aside. Add all the seeds to the pan and cover. once they start to pop, add the drained rice and mix thoroughly for even distribution. Add water, just enough to cover the rice and let it cook on low heat. You may need to add more water. They trick is to add water bit by bit so you don't end up with soggy rice.

When the rice is cooked, stir in the fried onions. 

Serve with goat stew or cat fish.

All Gone!

Can I just put it out there that kuli kuli and kankuwa originated from Nupe land? thank you!

My great Aunt is the king, yes king of kulikuli and dankuwa in Lafiagi. I once took some to work and everyone was going crazy over them. I am sure there is some secret ingredients she adds to her recipe which I am must ask her for that make them taste so lovely. She also dries them as opposed to frying them.

I find it weird that people fry their kuli kuli and suya. The first time I saw suya being fried in Lagos, I almost passed out. I was like that's not how we do it. This was apparently the best suya in Lagos. I shall not mention names!

Anyway I decided to make some kuli kuli and dankuwa as I suddenly had a craving for them. the difference between the two is how you process them, the ingredients are the same.

Kuli Kuli

Ingredients:

1 cup of roasted groundnut, salted
a pinch of dry grounded pepper
one muslin cloth

Method:

Blend the groundnut and pepper until you get a very thick creamy paste. Using a tablespoon, scoop half a spoonful and place on a foil lined tray. using the back of the spoon, flatten the paste. Repeat until all the paste is done. leave in a dry area to dry. This can be placed outside to dry in the sun or in a dehydrator until it is crunchy.

Dankuwa

The only different between the method is that you blend the groundnut to a dough texture, so not as creamy as kuli kuli. This means you blend this for a short duration than when blending for kuli kuli. The next step is to place the dough is the muslin cloth and squeeze out any excess oil. Mould this dough in balls or into any shape you like.






You won't believe i have no pictures of the finished product as my dearest AF wacked everything before I could get a chance to take any. He left one dankuwa for me. Just one! Sigh! 

How Do You Like It?

Life is funny sha! Funny how we take things for granted. Masa is one of those Nigerian foods I was never crazy about. I like it, I am or was never crazy about it.  I grew up around it so it was always available. In the eighteen months I spent in Nigeria I don’t remember craving it. I probably ate it once when I went home to visit my folks. I move to Doha and all of a sudden I crave it amongst other things.

My craving was so intense that I went out to buy a cupcake maker just for masa (because I didn’t have the “kwanu” to cook it in).  I followed 9jafoodie recipe, which is so easy I must say but I baked it instead of frying. 

Here are the different ways I enjoyed my masa:

Masa served with lamb stew

Masa Added to stir fry, can be an appetiser 

Gizzard broth with masa and vegetables

All masa dishes including served with suya and served with plain honey.

An Orgasmic Experience!

For a change of scenery AF took us to the Villagio mall. City Centre mall was our go to place. By the time we got there we were so famished and ready to consume a whole horse! Our hungry step led us to a French restaurant called le Notre which felt more like a posh cafe complete with pastries and dessert at the entrance inviting you in..

As the waiter was leading us to our table I begged for some bread and tomato juice with all the spices (I wanted a come but they had only Pepsi, yuck!). When we got to our table the waiter stood there asking jamb questions! I am like dude please go and get me some bread and drink before I die. He laughed and handed us some thick menu before heading to fetch some bread.

I hate long menus. They confuse me especially when I am hungry. Luckily this one had pictures to make things easier. I ordered pasta - linguine with clams and prawns to be exact. AF ordered mushroom soup and quail. We had to beg the waiter like a million times before our meal arrived.

AF suddenly screamed after taking a spoon of his soup. I was so shocked and worried. In between mouthfuls he was oh-ing and ah-ing, trying to describe how lovely the soup was. He actually used the word "orgasmic" to describe it. How corny! I was like "is that why you want them to throw us out?"  He then shoved a spoonful into my mouth and it was indeed delicious. I abandoned my starter and helped him finish his. He wasn't too pleased about that. Lol!

Not to be outdone by some professional chef (right!) I decided to make my version for AF. As soon as he saw it he laughed. He figured that the way reacted to le Notre's soup got me a bit jealous. He wolfed the soup down and said it was even better! I beamed from ear to ear and proceeded to eat mine and almost spat it out! He lied! It was so salty my taste buds were rioting! Ah my rep!

As I didn't want the only memory of my mushroom soup AF to be a salty one, I prepared another batch the very next day but this time paying attention to the amount of salted added. AF gave it 2 thumbs up.

Mushroom Soup

Ingredients:

Mushrooms (chopped)

1 medium onion (chopped)
50g of butter

3 tablespoon of cream

Black pepper

Thyme

1.5 cups of chicken stock (or 1.5 cups of water and 1 stock cube)

Salt to taste

Method:

heat the butter on medium heat in a sauce pan and fry the onions and mushrooms until the onions are translucent. add the thyme and stock. simmer for another 10 minutes. Blend the mixture in a blender to combine all the ingredients thoroughly. return the mixture to the sauce pan, add the cream and black pepper. simmer for 5 minutes. Check for salt.

The Last Year at a Glance

Since I last posted, my blog became severely infected with spam, virus and bugs. I spent a long time trying to fix it and eventually gave up. I never gave up cooking though.

Since I last posted, I won third place in the Knorr Taste Quest. I was surprisingly called back after I had left for the grand finale. I was really shocked and excited but also very nervous. I needed to bring my A game and put all fears behind me. We were given gigantic worms to cook among other things. I just channeled my fears of creepy crawlies into cooking something scrumptious and in the end it paid off.

Since I last posted, I got engaged, got married to my AF and had a beautiful baby girl, Z.

Since I last posted, I moved cities, first to Aberdeen from Lagos and now live in Doha, Qatar. So it’s been a lot of moving, packing and unpacking for me. Tiring but very exciting.

With my blog up and running, my feet firmly in one place I hope to continue to post recipes for you all.

Thanks for never giving up on me.