This is another in my “How to series”. Stay tuned for a couple more. What brought this about? Well, I wanted to make Jollof rice in the oven yesterday (recipe HERE) and I realised I did not have stock. I looked through my freezer and I could see huge chunks of meat, but I truly wasn’t interested in the whole 9 yards of boiling meat. At that point, I got flashbacks of watching Jamie Oliver, Nigella and Ina Garten make beef stock. I remember watching them and thinking, nah, this kind of stock will not work in Nigerian cooking. They used scraps of meat on the bone, vegetables like carrots, leeks, onions, parsnips, cabbage, sprigs of thyme, rosemary, and so many I couldn’t remember and they let all boil for a very long time, sieving the stock afterwards.

While watching those shows, I remembered saying to myself I would try something similar and amend it to Nigerian cooking. This was years ago. Those memories came back last night. I looked into my freezer and saw a packet of diced beef, thanks to Anne Enemaku who supplied me with gorgeous cuts of beef, steaks and chicken breast. I looked at that packet an idea was born. This time I was putting my Food Network watching skills to good use, and I produced a stock that was waaaaaaaaay richer than our traditional method of boiling meats. If you use curry and thyme to marinate, this method will work if you need stock for dishes that are not native. For non native dishes like Jollof rice, fried rice, sauces etc, you can use curry and thyme. You can make this in advance and freeze in small containers. Best of all, with this method, you can still reuse the meat because you are not boiling for very long, which is common in many recipes of making your own stock. You extract the best part of the juices early enough, in fact by the time you are done, with the stock, the meats are still a little pink inside. Just finish off by grilling in the oven, and perfect you’ve gotten the best of both worlds, juicy beef and yummy stock. Here’s how

You will need

Diced beef

Onion Powder

Garlic Salt

Curry - optional

Thyme - optional

Seasoning cubes

Salt

Vegetable oil

How To

Dooney’s Kitchen Tip: If you have big chunks of beef, it is important you dice it to about the length of your little finger. This is very important, because you want the beef to have a smaller surface area to react with the that from the pan.

1. Season your diced beef with all I listed above. The untidy of spices and seasoning used will of course depend on how much raw beef you have.

Finish off with about 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil, stir to ensure that the beef is well coated and leave in your fridge to marinate for 45minutes to 1 hour.

The aroma wafting from the beef is so amazing, you would want to have a taste before remembering the beef is raw.

2. Before you take the beef out of the fridge, heat up your frying pan with just enough oil to coat it i.e. dip your fingers in oil and rub the base of the pan. Place on the heat till it gets very hot.

3. Place the beef in the pan, and sear it on each side.

Dooney’s Kitchen Tip: before you turn to the other side, ensure that side has been well seared, till you see brown caramelised marks on the beef. 

4. Once you have exhausted the beef, place in a bowl and set aside for it to rest. As the beef is resting, you will see more juices flowing out of it into the bowl. If you cut into 1 or 2 pieces, you would see that it is still a little raw inside. See the raw bits in the meat.

5. Drain those juices out into the pan, lower the heat and use a wooden spoon to gently ease out the burnt bits from the pan. Return all the beef to the pan, add more water to get about halfway, and then lower the heat for another 10minutes or so.

6. When you check it again, you would see this really thick and rich stock simmering away nicely. Take a spoon and give it a quick taste, and marvel at how delicious it is.

7. Take out the diced beef, allow it to drip very well and place in a bowl. You can then proceed to grilling or frying the beef in the oven. With this method, you did not overcook the beef, and it will still be very taste, juicy and tender.

8. Leave the stock to cool, pour into silicone moulds, or ice-cube tray and freeze. When you need to cook, just pop one or two cubes and finish off with salt. If you feel you must still cook with seasoning cubes, this homemade stock cubes will definitely make you use less than the quantity you normally would cook with.

The beauty of this method is that, the stock is so intense, and the volume I got out of it, was enough to fill 3 mould containers (48). Considering I only used 1 knorr chicken cube to season, and I got 48 stock cubes out of the process, this method is fantastic if you are toeing the line of reducing your salt and seasoning cube intake either for health reasons or to stay away from the dreaded MSG. Best off all, you get the real essence of meat, flavoured and enhanced with natural flavour enhancers.

When you want to cook, just get the mould out of the freezer, and pop the number you need into your pot of soup or stew

Oh the journey to making this dish was hilarious at best. I wanted my next post on Bella Naija to be something quite unusual but still undoubtedly Nigerian. I looked through my list of recipes I would like to share and ticked a few options. Going further down the list, Abari stood out, and then Epiti, which gave me the idea to write a post about the tales of 2 uncommon Nigerian steamed dishes. Oh dear, I should just have gone with my original idea to cook Ofe Akwuko using a recipe a reader Mrs Eze sent to me. Going to Peckham to buy Ugba (which was the reason I didn’t cook it), would have been way less stressful than what I went through. Refusing to give up, I tried different combinations till I found something that worked. If you live outside Nigeria and cooking these two steamed dishes has always been a pain for you, you will want to read this. Especially now that corn would soon be in season, you want to pay close attention.

What is Abari? It is simply Savoury Steamed Corn. Think Moin Moin, but with corn instead of beans. Abari is the Ekiti name for it. Abari goes even further, because garden eggs are added. In other cultures it is called Ukpo Oka, Sapala, Oka Ekusu or Ekoki, Igba Ngwu Oka. I would like to know what you call it in your culture. The Igbos and The Efiks add vegetables to it like scent leaf or nchawu, ugu leaves, anyara leaves and sometimes Uziza. I was initially going for the Ekiti-Igbo/Ekiti fusion but with the frustrations I faced when making it, I totally forgot about my idea and churned out the pure Ekiti version. You can update my recipe and do a multi cultural fusion dish. Please remember to send me your pictures or drop comments on the blog when you do. Here’s how

I don’t know how I thought it was a good idea to blend dry corn to make Abari. While blending it, with my blender groaning a little, I realised it was not going to work and that is how I became an accidental ogi maker. If you would like to know how to make your own Ogi in 5 days, go to my blog. Back to Abari. I used sweetcorn instead. if you’ve been having problems with making this dish using frozen corn from the supermarket,  or fresh corn with the leaves removed, try sweetcorn.

You will need

Cans of Sweetcorn

Tatashe – red bell pepper

Chopped red onions

Crayfish

Garden eggs – substitute with aubergines (eggplant)

Ata rodo – scotch bonnet/habanero pepper

Salt

Seasoning cubes

Dry pepper – cayenne pepper or paprika

shredded smoked fish

Plain flour or corn flour – to thicken

Palm oil – you can substitute with vegetable oil

Banana leaves or heat proof containers

How To

1. Rinse and quarter the garden eggs. If you are turning your nose up at garden eggs, believe me, I used to until I tried something else apart from boiling. The solution to your garden egg pet peeve is to grill it. Place the quartered garden eggs on an oven tray, season with salt, a sprinkling of crushed seasoning cubes, dry pepper and a little topping of oil. Whack in the oven for 5 – 7 minutes.

The garden egg ‘chips’ would come out smelling and tasting great. Only a slight tinge of bitterness would be left, you may not even notice.

2. While the garden eggs are grilling, blend the sweetcorn with tatashe and rodo till a smooth paste. You can add onions if you wish, or chop whole and add to the paste

3. Pour into a bowl and add chopped red onions (optional), crayfish, shredded smoked fish, the grilled garden eggs fresh from the oven, salt, seasoning cubes and palm oil. Dooney’s Kitchen Tip: be careful with the palm oil though, otherwise you will end up with a sharp orange abari, and not the pleasing moin moin type colour. Add palm oil in tablespoon increments. You can also choose to use vegetable oil, or even mix both.

4. Combine all gently, taste for salt and seasoning and readjust accordingly. With the crayfish, smoked fish and grilled garden eggs already with some salt content, you want to be careful about the amount of salt you add.

5. Thicken the paste with corn flour or plain flour. Dooney’s Kitchen Tip: this step is important to give the paste some body, otherwise you will find yourself steaming forever, running up a gas or electricity bill and the abari would not come together and solidify. I learnt my lesson the first time. You only need to thicken with about a tablespoon or 2 of flour. It doesn’t affect the taste but saves you the frustration.

i only added pepper here because i forgot to blend ata rodo (scotch bonnet/habanero pepper) with the corn

6. If you have the local banana leaves, fold into the traditional shape, pour in the corn paste and steam in a pot. If you are using oven proof containers, simply line with a little oil, pour in the paste and whack in the oven. Yes, you can bake moin moin in the oven. Remember to fill a baking tray with water, and place in the oven. This is to keep the oven moist and steamy, thereby recreating the steaming process in a pot.

7. Bake in the oven at 180 degrees centigrade (fahrenheit conversion) for roughly 15 minutes.

When it comes out of the oven, it should still be soft, but not squiggly. That’s your Abari done.

Serve with garri and Cold water. Enjoy

I posted this on Bella Naija and found out this dish is also called Ekusu. One more name to add to the list.

Stay tuned for the recipe for Epiti in the next post

If you are reading this post, chances are that you just came back from reading my post about Abari. If Corn ‘Moin Moin’ is to Abari, Plantain ‘Moin Moin’ is to Epiti. The recipe is basically the same, this time you are working with Plantain and Corn, and by corn, fresh corn would be your best bet, but if you can’t source that because of the time of the year, replace with sweetcorn, frozen corn or mini corn on the cob. As I wrote with Abari, remember to thicken with corn flour, plain flour or corn meal.

If you have tried Abari, you definitely want to try Epiti. You can even do as I did and make both on the same day. Ooooooh, lush. I must warn though, over ripe plantain has quite a strong flavour, therefore add enough sweetcorn to match that flavour, otherwise all you would taste is the plantain. To half a plantain, I used two 165g of sweetcorn. You would think that the sweetness of both would be an overload, but it works, especially if you make it spicy. If your kids don’t like Moin Moin, they are guaranteed to love this.

You will need

Cans of Sweetcorn - or whatever your choice of corn

Plantains - overripe

Tatashe - red bell pepper

Crayfish

Ata rodo - scotch bonnet/habanero pepper

Salt

Seasoning cubes

Dry pepper - cayenne pepper or paprika

shredded smoked fish

Plain flour or corn flour - to thicken

Palm oil - you can substitute with vegetable oil

Banana leaves or heat proof containers

How To

1. Blend the overripe plantains with the corn to a smooth puree. You can also add the tatashe, and rodo, and blend at once.

2. Mix in the ground crayfish and shredded smoked fish

3. Mix in the palm oil. Be careful with the volume of palm oil you add, so you can have the pale fine, orange colour that is so classic ‘moin moin’.

Mix in thoroughly

4. Pour into banana leaves, or oven proof dishes such as ramekins. Dooney’s Kitchen Tip: remember to place the oven proof dishes in a deep oven tray and fill halfway with water to keep the oven moistened with steam. Let it bake in the oven at 180 degrees (350 in fahrenheit).

Ta daaaaa……………….

Turn it over unto a plate

see, it does look like moin moin doesn’t it.

As with Ebiripo (recipe HERE), I enjoyed Epiti with a fried palm oil sauce on the side

Like with Ebiripo, I enjoyed eating Epiti with a fried palm oil sauce. Enjoy

My first Product Review. Yaaaaaaaaaaay. I was contacted by a budding entrepreneur, (Ebenezer) who asked if he could send his packaged Ofada rice to me for a product review. I was excited to say the least. Ooooooh, I love the idea of a Product Review. This is even more special because it is a product that is just hitting the market, and I feel truly blessed to be able to support a start-up. I know it is not easy and I praise and salute Ebenezer’s courage to go into business. I hope you all support him en-masse. He is supplying a product that we all love and for many of us who live outside of Nigeria, you can add crave to the list.

What is the product? Well, just in case you were distracted, I am introducing Clevenard Ofada rice. This is packaged Ofada rice without the stones. For some of us who grew up picking this rice ad nauseam, this must be a welcome relief. If you have only ever eaten Ofada rice at parties for this same reason, or if by some weird chance, you enjoy the rice but have never cooked it at home before, well listen up. Ofada rice is only a click of a button away. Order, enjoy and serve with my Ayamase. Enjoy the real authentic combination. Trust me, I have been making dozens of posts of ayamase, but when combined with proper Ofada rice, ooooooooooh, it felt good. Veeeeeeeery good. All I needed was the local Moin Moin leaves and match, set, score. I am on the hunt for those leaves today, I want the full monty experience.

So, here’s the Product Review:

First, the packaging. I was sent a 500g pack, (it also comes in 1kg) with the Clevenard brand shown clearly. On the side of the box, you can find Contact details such as the website, phone numbers (Nigeria and UK), customer care email address, and corporate email address. On the back of the box, you will find Nutritional fact results, calories per 100g, and instructions for preparation. You also get to read a brief piece about the umbrella organisation that supports the company.

Opening the box, the ofada rice grains are sealed in a clear plastic bag, which you will have to tear open. I haven’t seen raw Ofada rice in ages, I had forgotten the grains were mush smaller, with a greyish brown hue. I remember my eyes widening when I opened the packet. You can tell that this is the real unpolished rice. Checking for stones, I didn’t see any. The only non rice component, are a few flecks of the leaves.

Pouring the rice into a bowl of water to rinse, this was my result, after rubbing the grains through my fingers to get rid of any dirt and dust. I decanted the grey water.

By the second rinse, the water was much clearer

I decided to give it a third and final rinse, and I was quite satisfied. You can see the Ofada rice grains below, quite clean and ready to be cooked

I split the rice into two small pots, to test for taste and texture. I added enough water to cook the rice in both pots.

To Pot 1, I added just salt

To Pot 2, I added a little oil, chopped onions and salt.

I had to take a shot of the contents of the bottom of the bowl, so you can see that there was little or no sand at the bottom and not one single stone in sight.

I left both pots to boil on high heat, they both bubbled and boiled the way rice is supposed to, nothing different and in 15minutes, the rice grains had absorbed water and plumped up beautifully. I needed a little extra top up of water in both pots though, but 5 minutes after it was gorgeous. If you are worried about the smell of Ofada rice boiling, use the Pot 2 method and you should have no problems. In fact, I quite enjoyed Pot 2, so much so that I descended on it immediately with Ofada sauce. The only pictures I have for Pot 2, were the ones I used for plating below.

Here is Pot 1, soft, plump and oh so Ofada. It wasn’t soggy one bit. It behaved exactly as it should.

The aroma just brings back memories

Remember my Pot 2, well here are shots of what I could salvage after my spoon descended on it. I found that I preferred the extra flavour of the oil and chopped red onions.

Now imagine yourself eating Ofada rice and Ofada sauce. Come on, imagine it. How does it feel. Uhmmmm, the aroma of the real thing, paired with Ayamase. Okay, stop salivating now and order. I recommend it.

Ebenezer has graciously agreed to give you guys a 10% discount for Easter. Imagine how pleased and surprised your guests are going to be this Easter when you serve delicious Ayamase with the real Ofada rice. I definitely know mine would, my secret weapon to host this Easter. Shhhhhhhhhh, don’t tell them.

To order your Clevenard Ofada Rice at £4.99 per 1kg pack, please click HERE. Remember your 10% discount. Use the promo code DOONEYSKITCHEN. All one word.Thank you Ebenezer.

If you have a product you want to get out there, send it to me and I would do a Product Review. I have one more coming up, and it is just as exciting as this one. I sure hope you guys order this rice. Take a break from your normal everyday rice and enjoy the taste of home. Well done Ebenezer and I wish you all the best of luck in business.

I hosted The Atoke of Bella Naija last week. She came on Thursday night with express warnings of ‘Dunni, I am on a strict diet please, all those tantalising dishes of yours, I can’t indulge. No carbs please’. I said okay, okay and snickered behind her back. Hehehehehe. No one comes over and tells me they can’t eat this or that. Let me finish cooking it first, and then we can have that conversation while you are resisting temptation. Anyway, in preparation of her arrival, I sent her a list of things I wanted to cook. Knowing meats are not her top priority in the food dictionary, I decided to get out my seafood stash from the freezer, including Lobster and make Fisherman’s soup instead. You see, I have been saving those Lobsters for special guests. One down, one more to go in the freezer. Applications to be my houseguest for a weekend are now welcome. Lol

Technically, Fisherman’s soup is just a fish broth made with Palm oil. I have made its sister dish before, Seafood Stew (recipe HERE). I did not call it Fisherman’s soup at the time because it was just a slight variation with vegetable oil and I added things like ground tomatoes, tatashe (red bell pepper) and red onions. I also did not need to thicken it, because the ground pepper mixture had done all that for me. I ended up making a stew. Not to open myself to raised eyebrows especially from Efik people who Fisherman’s Soup is native to, I decided to simply call it Seafood Stew. Since Atoke was coming over, and fish/seafood are one of her major sources of protein, I decided to make Fisherman’s Soup. I already had stew at home (ooooh, I invented a new stew, can’t wait to share), I decided to  make Fisherman’s Soup instead of Seafood stew.

Now, this is where Atoke and I disagreed a little bit. Fisherman’s soup is thickened with a little garri. She told me zero carbs, like zilch, nada. ‘Dunni I haven’t eaten carbs for 3 months now, don’t make me come here for a few days and fall off the wagon’. Okay, Okay, I have heard. Now, what can I use to thicken the soup, otherwise it would be as watery as peppersoup. Think of Fisherman’s soup as the sister to peppersoup but with Palm oil and without the peppersoup spices. Fisherman’s soup is also a close cousin to the Rivers Native Soup (recipe HERE) very close cousin, just that cocoyam, achi or ofor is used as a thickener, instead of garri. Don’t you just love how united Nigeria is food wise.

Using only finely chopped or ground ata rodo (scotch bonnet/habanero pepper) would not work, so I decided to go my seafood stew route and blend some tomatoes to give me the thickness I desired. Thickness to still make it a soup mind you, not stew. Atoke used the words, ‘Dunni don’t let the Devil use you o’. Well you guys know me, mischief is my middle name. I succumbed to a little temptation and used a teeny bit of garri, while she wasn’t looking. Just so I could give the soup a little body. The results were astounding and she loved the soup so much she had seconds and thirds. She found out later that I added garri. She enjoyed the soup so much, she didn’t complain. I know anyone on a diet would read this with a sharp intake of breath. Come on, I didn’t poison her, the amount I added was negligible. If you would like to take a break from meats for a while try making Seafood Stew or Fisherman’s Soup. Here’s how:

You will need

A medley of Seafood - i used lobster, tiger prawns, mussels, clams, crabs, monk fish and croaker fish. Use any bits of fish and seafood you can lay your hands on. Think Fishermen’s catch

3 pieces of Ata rodo

1 red onion

3 pieces of tomatoes - optional

1 – 2 handfuls of garri

Water

Salt

Seasoning cubes

Palm Oil

Herb for garnishing - efinrin, nchawu, ntong, uziza, basil

How To

1. Give your seafood a thorough rinse and set aside

2. Heat up palm oil in the pot, add chopped onions and add the salted and seasoned croaker fish. Carefully turn over the fish, for a light fry and then take it out. Dooney’s Kitchen Tip: you take out the fish to preserve its shape. Remember, you are only lightly frying the fish just to flavour the palm oil. Remember my Rivers Native Soup recipe (click HERE), this was how I started the soup. I love recycling stuff. Like I mentioned above, both soups are very close cousins. Lol

2. Add the blended tomatoes and let it cook for a bit in the palm oil. This is not stew, so you don’t need it to fry. Just enough to cook to get rid of the sour, acidic tomato flavour. Again, adding tomatoes is optional and not the traditional route to go. Dooney’s Kitchen Tip: for rivers native soup, I added just pepper, which was fine because I had a thickener coming to complete the job. With my guest on a strict diet, my starchy thickener was banned, so the next possible option which would give the soup some needed body and healthy for her to eat were tomatoes.

3. Add water. Enough water to cook the seafood that you have. Enhance the taste with salt and seasoning cubes. Let it boil for a bit

4. Add the seafood. I started with my giant Mr Lobster

followed by crabs

followed by mussels and clams

and then tiger prawns and chopped monk fish

This filled the pot, and even took over the watery stock. I lowered the heat, as you should do when cooking seafood. Dooney’s Kitchen Tip: it is important to cook seafood on low heat to preserve the flavour. Except if you want to sear it i.e. flash cooking, and with flash cooking, the seafood cooks in minutes. 

5. Remember to return the croaker fish back to the pot. As the fish and seafood were cooking in the stock, they were releasing their own water, making it even more watery like peppersoup. I knew I just had to thicken it. Dooney’s Kitchen Tip: If this was meat you see, I would just have left it to continue cooking, and wait for the stock to thicken on its own, but with the expensive seafood I had in that pot, it is a great injustice to leave them to over cook. Great injustice. Seafood loses flavour, texture feels rubbery and gross if you let it over cook. Lobster cooks in 8 minutes mind you, the rest in under 5 minutes. Chef Jason Atherton would probably have my head for daring to cook seafood with different cooking times in the same pot, but I still followed the rules by adding the lobster first, then later the rest. With no choice left to me, I quickly soaked garri in water, let it soften and I added it to the pot. Readjusted for salt again and let the garri do its job.

Ta daaa, a few minutes later, my previous watery almost transparent peppersoup like fisherman’s soup thickened beautifully, and by thickened it took on a soup texture (think western soups) and not stew like i.e. Nigerian red stew. I was so pleased, it was worth ‘allowing the Devil use me to ruin Atoke’s diet’. Hehehehehe. If you still want it thicker, you either add more garri or you take out all the seafood and let the soup thicken on its own on high heat.

This was just gorgeous with roasted plantain. See Mr Lobster there rising up to be noticed.

This is a winning dish when you truly want to impress. It is also simple, simple, simple. You can’t go wrong. If you have tried my Rivers Native Soup, this would just be a breeze. I suggest you serve in a very big deep dish and garnish with chopped herbs. In this case, I used Uziza.

Enjoy

I am sure my mother will laugh her head off when she sees this, because this is so uncharacteristic of me, if you know me well you would laugh too. Me, Oladunni Obata willingly make Ogi (pap, akamu), How, why, when, because. In fact, it sounds nicer in Yoruba. Kiloshele, Kilode, bawo, Ehn hen, So to’to. You made Ogi. Hmmmmmn, people, I made Ogi. Accidentally though. This is what happened when I tried to make Abari (corn moin moin) and I ended up with Ogi. Fresh corn is not in season yet and I really don’t know why I thought using dried corn would work. Here I was, buying ingredients for Abari (recipe HERE), I spied dried corn at the Asian store and picked it up. I was in for a very rude shock.

This is not your standard way of making Ogi, but as I say with food, feel free to turn it over on its head. Just because your mother, grandmother and your entire generation have been using a particular method, doesn’t mean that it is the only method. I proved that with this Ogi, surprisingly so. You see, the standard method of making Ogi is to allow the dried corn soak in water for 2 – 3 days, kick starting the fermentation process, after which it is blended to a paste, allowed to sit for another few days, sieved and allowed to sit some more. The longer it is left to ferment, the more tart or tangy it tastes. On SYTCC on Facebook,there is a homemade Ogi revolution going on. This time for people who live outside Nigeria, where getting fresh Ogi can be difficult to source. I looked at their posts, their excitement was palpable, but I knew no way in hell would I attempt to make Ogi, even for the fun of it. It aint happening. Now, imagine my shock when I turned into an accidental Ogi maker.

If you have read their posts, or other posts online about making Ogi, you would see something like 10 days, 14 days, 19 days, repeat the sieving, drain the that, replace the this. If the rigour of the process turned you off, well allow me to introduce you to the stress free 5 day method. Now, I have this Ogi in my fridge that I haven’t touched, but you know what, ideas are flowing in on what to do with it. One has materialised and will be shared shortly. My mum quite enjoys Ogi, I can’t wait for her to visit this year. I will make this shortly before she arrives. You guys know I will update you with her feedback. This is as tangy and as tart as the traditional Ogi, the texture, the same. Who knew? Lol

You will need

1 pack of dried corn - i used hominy corn which I picked up from the Asian store

Water

Fine cloth to sieve

Blender.

How To

Now, you can decide to go the traditional method and soak the dried corn for 2 – 3 days before blending, it is up to you. Especially if you don’t have a powerful blender. I am narrating my experience. I wanted to make Abari, so I only soaked it for less than 2 hours.

1. Soak the corn and blend. Here’s a picture of the dried corn I used

Dooney’s Kitchen Tip: expect to see some chaff, after all your blender is not as powerful or as efficient as the commercial blenders in Lagos markets. If your blender can’t stand the pressure, I advise you let the corn soak for 2 days at least. Mine was up to the task

2. Sieve the blended corn in a plastic mesh sieve, and throw away the chaff.

Again, this isn’t how Ogi is made. We are told don’t sieve immediately. You know all those rote routine that is passed down from generation to generation without question, well, I guess it is safe to say this is one that totally disproves that theory.

3. Almost immediately after sieving the corn, the contents below start to behave like Ogi. This surprised me a lot. It was congealing, it was resisting my fingers, just like Ogi.

I believe this is the point I knew it wasn’t going to work for Abari and I ditched the idea. Thank goodness, I didn’t go ahead, otherwise, I would have ended up with Steamed Peppered Ogi instead of Abari. Ugh!!!!

The day you start, begins to count as your Day 1. I only sieved in a plastic mesh on that eventful Sunday and I just let it sit there with water floating on top.

4. By Day 3, I opened the bowl and I could see bubbles floating on top. It also had that fermentation smell. Quite interesting. Leave it again for another day, the bubbles will still be on.

5. I forgot to check on Day 4 but by Day 5, the bubbles had disappeared, the water on top has clear has a distinctive sweet and sour taste, plus alcohol smell from fermentation. The Yoruba’s call it ‘Omi dun’ meaning sweet water.

………..and that’s your Pap done in 5 days. Now, you can leave it to sit for much longer if you want it really tangy and tart. It is up to you, but by now, you have Ogi ready to use. As you can see, it is creamy and dense just like Ogi is supposed to be.

I could still feel a little grit, so I pulsed for a few minutes using my hand blender (you can put it back into your regular blender) and sieved with a very fine cheesecloth.

you will see crystallised dried out Ogi on the cheesecloth after the liquid has drained off.

Closer shot of the bowl. You can see the clear water on top

Dip a spoon into the bowl to scoop out some Pap, as you can see below, it reacts exactly as it should i.e. some resistance against the spoon.

Ta daaaaa………Pap in 5 days

See the congealing I mentioned above. Even after taking out a spoon, that area left behind a gap, or would I say peaks.

Closer shot

See the resistance. It did not slide off the spoon easily

It feels like Ogi to touch, it smells like Ogi. 5 days and that’s it. You can start this weekend, and by next weekend you have Ogi to feed your family for breakfast with Akara or Moin Moin.

That’s how to make Pap, the unconventional, Dooney’s Kitchen Accidental Method.

This is definitely for people who live outside of Nigeria. My last Ewa Aganyin post (click HERE) showcased ingredients that may be difficult to source for many people who don’t live close to Nigerian food Stores. Well, I heard your complaints, I listened well and thanks to my fabulous neighbour Funmi, I am bringing you a solution. You will still enjoy Ewa Aganyin, the taste is pretty close, the aroma is spot on, and I mean spot on, even my extra acute spidey sense taste buds and sense of smell will agree. How did I come across this recipe, well my neighbour served me a plate of Ewa Aganyin and I asked her what she put in it. It was a great confirmation for me because my original recipe did not include something she added, but a Togolese reader who left a comment on the original recipe said onions are good for the stew to help tone down the heat. BOOM!!

I just have to share how I met my neighbour. A very smile inducing serendipity story. You see, Funmi is also a Member of So You Think You Can Cook on Facebook. I have had my eye on her posts for a while because her food just looks amazing. I had left many comments on her posts, we had a friendly banter going on, little did I know she lives just a few doors away from me. Not until one fateful evening when she posted food again on the group and I spied her kitchen worktop. Honestly, I can’t remember what the food was, but what really caught my eye was the kitchen worktop covering. It was EXACTLY like mine. I thought to myself with my pulse racing. No way, No freaking way, Could it be, nah, not possible. OMG! I went through her other pictures, even more proof. She had the same kitchen cupboards, in the same location as mine, her induction hob which was peeking through some of the pictures was the same as mine, also in the same location. At this point I was so sure we had at least the same Estate Developer in common.

You see, many times developers use the same materials in furnishing their flats and houses, so I didn’t want to celebrate yet, just in case I was wrong and she lived far away from me but the same company built both our homes. I quickly sent her a message on Facebook. I was too excited to be polite. The message read thus “Hi Funmi, where do you live, who built your house, F——– Developers?”. I am sure she must have been thinking huh? Why do you want to know. It took some time before she responded and you can imagine, I could barely sit still. She responded people, with music to my soul. OMG, we lived in the same development. We moved in one month shy of each other in 2012. Can you beat that. We have been neighbours for almost 2 years, commenting on each other’s posts for like forever, and we never knew. Funmi literally lives a few doors from me. I can walk blindfolded to her front door. I almost wanted to race to her house, but this was 10pm, I had to observe British courtesy.

Since then, we see each other very regularly, she is one of the best things that has happened to me this year. OMG, it feels good to really have a neighbour that is amazing, warm, friendly and very genuine. She has brought food to me when I was ill, checked up on me, introduced me other friends and family who have embraced me warmly. I hosted her with friends and family on Sunday. She goes to the neighbourhood African store and picks things up for me. Remember my Buka Ewedu post (HERE), Funmi said she remembered me saying I missed fresh ewedu and she bought me 2 bunches when she saw some at the Nigerian food store. I have eaten in her house till I couldn’t walk. I closed at 9pm twice in one week, she opened her house to me and fed me freshly made food on both nights. Never realised people could still be this nice. Considering so called “friends” have showed me their true colours recently, I was beginning to wonder if I was the one that had a problem. It is quite refreshing to see the other side of friendship. Quite refreshing to know people who give back and truly show they value your presence in their lives. Facebook gets a lot of flack sometimes but I have met some pretty astounding people these past few months, that have come to mean so much more to me than people I have known for years. In another post, I will tell you how I met Lola. She lives just 9 minutes away from me. Another fabulous friend I found through doing what I do.

The connections I have made through this food of a thing, just confirms to me that The Almighty is listening to my prayers. For those of you I haven’t met, I want to say thank you again for filling my life with a lot of joy, colour and laughter. I pray that one day, fate allows our path to cross. I can’t wait to meet so many of you, you guys have no idea. So, courtesy of my new found neighbour, I bring you a very authentic tasting Ewa Aganyin stew.

You will need

1 cup of dried crushed chillies - you can find crushed chillies in any supermarket outside Nigeria, and also at Asian stores. 

2 onions - Funmi recommended white onions because that is what she uses instead of red. I use red, so we found a middle ground. 1 white onion, 1 red onion

Seasoning cubes

Salt

Palm oil - lots of it

Water

How To

The method is the same as mine, since Funmi came over to mine to make this, I just had to take pictures.

1. Blend the dried crushed chillies with onions and water to make a paste.

2. Heat up palm oil in the pot till it smokes a bit, pour in chopped red onions

3. Let the onions fry till it burns. Dooney’s Kitchen Tip: the onions should fry to burn, but not to turn to charcoal though. See picture below

4. Once the onions have started burning, add the pepper paste and let it fry. As with my last ewa aganyin post where I mentioned you need lots of oil, with Funmi’s method, you do need lots of palm oil. Why you say? Dooney’s Kitchen Tip: you need the pepper to fry till it takes on the form and texture of small pebbles, or grainy like, like sand. Without lots of oil, the pepper will burn and taste bitter. I actually had to dash to the Nigerian food store quickly to get more palm oil. If you are wondering why the wooden spoon, you need it to stir, stir and stir, so the pepper can fry but not burn. Yes, a lot of splashes will occur at first, so protect your hands.

5. See, it is still frying, but you are not there yet, with the texture. See the oil below, although the contents of the pot are not in focus, you can see oil floating and bubbling on top.

One thing to note too, the colour is still red, you still have a way to go. Rememebr to stir stir stir. Dooney’s Kitchen Tip: the art of stirring also aids the formation of that sandy, grainy texture.

6. With further frying, you can see the colour changing, getting deeper. It is also getting thicker and coming together. At this point, season with salt and seasoning cubes. Dooney’s Kitchen Tip: you need to season at this point while there is still a bit of moisture in the pepper, to allow the salt and seasoning cubes properly dissolve and flavour the aganyin stew before it sets. This way, the flavour of salt and seasoning cubes, will develop along the stew.

7. You let it keep frying until the oil you were worrying was being absorbed by the pepper suddenly overtakes the pot, you will almost wonder if someone added palm oil behind your back.

8. Keep frying, you are almost there. See how dark the aganyin stew looks like? The characteristic blackness, with the dot, dot dot like grainy texture. The aroma wasting through your kitchen will tell you, you have a winner right there.

According to Funmi, stop right there, leave it on your cooker overnight, and continue frying the next day. The flavour will even be more intense by the second batch of frying. Funmi’s Tip: you only need the second fry to be short lived though, not as long as the day before, so it doesn’t burn.

You know me, I couldn’t wait. I was boiling a small pot of beans alongside it, so I was ready to whack ewa aganyin as soon as the stew was done. Here was my first taste. Doesn’t it look authentic. If you live in Nigeria, just use my original recipe HERE. You have access to Cameroon pepper and dried Shombo easily. This is for people who can’t source those ingredients. Thanks Funmi. Here’s to a long lasting and fulfilling friendship. I am grateful to The Lord for bringing you into my life.

Think of this sauce like the Ghanian Shito. As for storage, you can make lots of it and store in a sterilised jar. It doesn’t go bad because all the moisture has been zapped out with the lengthy time of frying.

I am sure you must be thinking, Dooney’s this is not your style, where is the food presentation you are known for, weeeeeeell, be patient. I have 3 wicked ways of using Ewa Aganyin stew, Dooney’s Kitchen style. The pictures will be released shortly. I am so proud of what I was able to work Ewa Aganyin stew with, if I may say so myself. Enjoy!!!!

This is not a food post, but I believe I have to write this to get it off my mind and also prepare you for the new direction Dooney’s Kitchen is taking. This is going to be quite long, so get ready. I had an interesting weekend to say the least. I got to see a snapshot of people’s real  thoughts and reactions towards what I do. You know how you get told, don’t take people’s support for you as they truly mean it, because for many people they are only in to get what they can from you and will hail you to your face as long as you are giving them what they want. The minute you decide not to, you see their other side. That came through loud and clear these past few days. As suspicious as I mostly am of people’s intentions (because I am right 8 out of 10 times), I believe I have let my guard down and became slightly naive by assuming everyone wishes me well. People you expect so much more from, show their hands even for a brief moment. You don’t see it coming, so you get taken aback. One thing I did learn though was that, those who truly support you, will come out guns blazing in your defence. No mincing of words, no sitting on the fence. They want what’s best for you and don’t mind telling the world so, even if at the time it is not the popular view.

I have been told I over share, and people are using my recipes, my ideas in their businesses with me not getting rewarded for it. I never really got fazed by it because for me this is me, I love cooking, I love experimenting and feel happy and proud I am making a difference in people’s lives. Last week, the idea came to make Ogi into Ice cream with Coconut. Considering I made Ogi accidentally and the only reason I didn’t throw it away was because Lola Ashiru was championing the cause and I also thought to see if Ice Cream would work with Ogi. In my excitement, I shared it on SYTCC and the responses I got though good, the tone changed when I refused to share the recipe. Funny enough, I actually meant to, but was waiting to properly plate the ice cream, take pretty pictures etc. Gosh the unwell wishers truly came out of the woodwork, when the recipe was not forthcoming. Even after a friend truly came out on my behalf and said Dunni, don’t share this one, before you get told it is now being sold commercially, just like my Kilishi and Suya pizza is now being sold at Pizza stores in Lagos. The reaction I got was quite disturbing. Luckily, I am not one to cry but it did make me feel quite sad.

To now start seeing further comments that downright implied what I did isn’t a big deal, it can be figured out, you want to go through the trouble of keeping it a secret, lets see you try, you don’t have the manpower or resources, you can’t patent a food recipe, you have been open and sharing all the while, why stop now (I bet you half the people are not trying it for their personal use – here’s my cynicism coming forth). What will be will be, even if someone uses your idea commercially, it doesn’t mean you won’t be rewarded in another place. You can be hired to work for so so and so to develop recipes for them. No thank you ma’am, I don’t want to be anyone’s employee, you truly wish me well, you should say oh, I see you running your own business, providing stuff for people to buy and use, not box my dreams up, under some supermarket will employ me to do such and such. Really!!!! I am doing all this to catch the attention of a freaking supermarket and be their recipe developer. REALLY!!! If I was your sister, would you say such?

Some even went far ahead to pull out similar recipes just to show that if you won’t share, please go sit down. Hey people, here’s how she did it, this is something that has been done before, you can use this in place of Ogi. If I found such, out of respect for the person and in good faith, knowing I want her to succeed, I wouldn’t basically draw a red line to similar things because it will remove the “specialness” from the person’s work. But not everyone thinnks like me, for some people decency and being a true and kind person is not in their dictionary. If you look hard, such people will call themselves “Christians”. This is no attack on Christianity. To be honest, I never saw those links they put up, the idea to do this came from my Kenwood recipe manual. I didn’t even use all the ingredients or measurements stated in the manual. It was a lot of trial and error, totally on my own that created that Ice cream. And these are people I had initially thought were so supportive and would like to see Dooney’s Kitchen grow beyond a blog. They leave comments praising my work, I found out it was all “eye service”. As long as I am sharing, using my own money, my own time, my energy, my effort, if it just stays as a blog that continually feeds you what you want, you don’t care. Such selfishness is incredible to say the least. You basically pulled the rug from under my feet and thought nothing of it. This is how you know those that don’t really wish you well. We as a people, are not in the habit of forming a ladder around each other to lift each other up. We as Nigerians are not the type who help each other up to the top, forgetting that it is a collective effort, when Nigerian food gets to the heights I am aiming it for, it will benefit all of us, yet we complain about the state of affairs in the country. I have always noticed it, but as they say experience teaches you. Forgetting that if I didn’t share that it can be done, you wouldn’t have know where to go looking. That is the beauty of inventions. Nothing is new under the sun, but someone took the time and energy to try something from what already exists. I will never forget this, lessons learned.

Amidst the sadness though, many comments were coming which lifted my spirits and restored my faith. People who championed my cause and said, allow her to keep this one to herself, shouldn’t she be rewarded for all her work, she has given enough to earn the right to keep this a secret. Quite a handful of comments along those lines. To you guys, you know yourselves. I won’t mention your names, as much as I would love to personally honour you, but your support strengthened my resolve. I will never forget what you wrote, never. I have a very long memory and when the time comes for me to do something wonderful for you, I will not hold back.

It wouldn’t stop me from doing what I do, I will blog about food, I can’t stop now, but from henceforth, I will start keeping my test experiments to myself. I am a very cynical person and I let my guard down, good thing I did though because if this didn’t happen, I wouldn’t have gotten the message some people who truly wished me well were saying about me over sharing. I have dreams to turn what I do into a very profitable business, the first of its kind, but it is clear now that to do that, I have to be a little selfish and start thinking of myself. You have always been wowed by the directions I take food to, and if I don’t hold back now, when it is time to dip into your pockets and pay for something I produce, many will tell themselves, nah, we’ve seen all she can do, nothing special. I have to now cultivate the habit of an air of mystery. Like how you only get to see an excerpt of a book, the trailer of a movie, which prompts you to go buy the book or watch the movie. One phrase came out ringing very loudly in my ears after I read the comment. It went thus ”from henceforth anything that can be commercially viable, no matter how excited you are about it, never ever let it out because you will get people screaming recipeeeeee”.

I also learnt something about competition and how it can bring out the meaness and nastiness from seemingly good people. To you I say, A flower does not think of competing to the flower next to it, it just blooms. There is room at the top for everybody. Bringing someone down doesn’t make a headway for you. The powers that be, don’t work like that. You may gain a little edge at first, but you will come crashing down so hard and fall flat on your face. You want to run down someone else’s hard work, take the shine off someone else, you will reap what you sow. I have the confidence to know that The Grace that has always been on my side will sort you out. I don’t even need to will it. It has always come to my support in the past, you don’t want to know where people who have done the same to me in the past are now, trust me. You want to step on me to advance yourself, I laugh, I truly laugh. I say bring it on, you will only be working towards your downfall.

And for the shameless copycats too, keep picking on my ideas, running off and doing it, that is all you will be known for. Lifting words off my blog, picking from me and adding to your own. I told my mum about it and she said errr, my dear, welcome to success. This is a mark of success. If no one is copying you, it means you are not doing things well. Those that are truly in the know, will know who is the original and who is the fake. Let them continue living in your shadow, that is where they will always be, while you press on to greater heights. So, to the shameless copycats, Oladunni Snr has spoken. Keep at it my dear, that will be what you are known for – Copying. I get notices from people, exposing your handiwork. I may not be able to do anything about it, but I know you will be dealt with from on High. As for chasing my shadow, get prepared dear, cos bigger things are coming, and chasing my shadow will become very exhausting for you. That I promise you. Believe me, you are NOT my competition, not even close. To be my competition, you would have to at least, be at the same level and it is obvious you are just a poor imitation. Word of advice, get some integrity for yourself, carve out your own identity and stop waiting for me to do something, while you run off like a rat that you are and go do something similar. You want to play with the big dogs, you better have your own bite. You can’t be as good as the person you are copying.

Sorry I had to unburden myself with this post. I felt it was necessary. This is a personal blog after all. Again, I salute those who really stood by my dreams. I pray The Lord will meet you at your point of needs and lift you up. You will attract people who will also lift you up. All our dreams will come true By His Grace. Looking forward to seeing you and interacting with you at the top. You will be part of the success of Dooney’s Kitchen. Amen.

The post The New Direction for Dooney’s Kitchen appeared first on Dooney's Kitchen.

You know what prompted the last post, this one. I sat down to type the recipe and suddenly felt so weak and overwhelmed. I had to get up from my seat and deliberately chat with someone just to shrug it off my shoulders. I tried to write again and the words just weren’t coming. I kept playing over the events of last weekend. Then I got to writing the last post. I had gone halfway before I realised, ooops, I am not writing about food. In fact, if I didn’t check at the last minute, that post would have had the same title as this one. Honestly, I am glad I got it out because the emotional writers block just lifted. To all of you who sent me a message on Facebook, left comments on the Dooney’s Kitchen Facebook Page, even on Twitter, left comments on the blog, I am truly grateful. For you guys to stand up like that in support, I felt really blessed. You guys will forever represent the majority to me, and I have taken all your advice on board and best wishes. This is what I love to do, and no one can take that away from me. Thanks again. My Mum says Thank you too. At your point of need, may you all will be surrounded by people who will come out and support you. I will never forget. Onward March to Progress.

Serendipity brought this recipe right into my laps. I wanted to make my Shombo (red chillies) stew one Saturday. It was a stew I developed when I lived in Abuja. It is my answer to red ayamashe but with only shombo. In English, imagine a stew made with just chillies. It is so hot, it will blow your head off, but really delicious at the same time. When I made it for friends, I served it with very cold water and a box of tissues. They would clean their plates while blowing their noses. Olamide, Fifi, Amaka, Bose, if you guys are reading this, you sure would remember. For this post, I decided to add long red pepper to tone down the heat, just so you guys won’t be discouraged to try it out. If you are brave, make this with only Shombo. Each time I started on the stew, I got distracted till it got dark and I forgot about it. That evening, my neighbour Funmi invited me over to her house for a “Come Dine With Me” style friendly cooking competition amongst her friends. It was there I met Chineo Bally. If you don’t know who Chinelo is, I suggest you Google or read her Bella Naija interview HERE. She was a finalist that made us proud on the BBC show The Great British Sewing Bee. The grand finale was last night. Though she didn’t win, Chinelo, you will always be a winner in our eyes. Your talent will always shine forth, we are right behind you cheering you on. It has been proven that you don’t need to win a show to be a huge success. Insert Olly Murs and Timi Dakolo.

We got to talking about Ayamase and she mentioned the woman who sold “Designer Stew” in Alade Market. She left Nigeria when she was 8 and she still remembers that stew. Of course, the other half of my childhood started off at Allen Avenue, so that stew is ingrained in my memory. We kept reminiscing about the stew, how it was deep red and not brown like Ayamase. The flavour is also quite distinct. Chinelo said her friends mum is the only person that has so far come close to re-creating that taste. I said really, tell me, tell me. Chinelo gladly shared and I knew I was going to try it out. Her friends mum’s added tomatoes to hers but I wanted to stick to my Shombo stew ingredient list,  boosting it with the extra tips Chinelo provided.

Think of this stew as a mash up of Ewa Aganyin + Buka Stew + Ayamase. Yes you read that correctly. The best of those 3 stews in one = an amazeballs stew that will finish with incredible speed. Look at how much I made. Between Atoke and I, we finished it in two days. She kept saying Dunni, this is so nice, I responded with, I know right? Lol. I planned to save some for Chinelo, but our greedy fingers got it all. Now, I have to make another pot. You smell it, and you think Ayamase because of the Iru and bleached Palm Oil, then you taste it and you get inflections of Ewa Aganyin from the burnt onions and slow cooking of the pepper, then towards the end you get that Buka Stew undertone because of the red pepper. BOOM!!! Smogersbord of flavours right there.

This stew is a lesson in patience. If you have a slow cooker, yaaaay for you. If you don’t I am giving you a huge pat on the back and cheering you on. You will be glad you did. Make lots of it please, otherwise you will want to go make another pot right away. If you have a family, they won’t be pleased to hear it has finished, and they wouldn’t understand that it took you almost 12hours to make it, you can’t just whip it up again at will. Lol. Remember I promised to try slow cooked stew when I put up my slow cooked Goat meat Peppersoup recipe (click HERE), well, I lived up to that promise. Thanks Chinelo. Slow Cooked Stew Rocks

You Will need

Fresh Shombo – red chilli

Long red Pepper – the long version of tatashe

Palm Oil

Chopped red onions

Iru – fermented locust beans

Beef Stock

Assorted meats

Salt

Seasoning cubes

To make this stew, you either start at night and let it fry overnight, then finish off in the morning or you start early in the morning and serve for dinner. You need those hours people, it is very crucial to the taste. No cheating here but it doesn’t need your input so don’t think you would be standing over your cooker watching stew cook.

here are the peppers that you need. The one in the middle is Shombo (red chilli), the other one is the Long Red pepper, what you can call Long Tatashe

How To

1. The trilogy stew starts with the Ayamase (ofada stew) technique of bleaching the palm oil. Only for 10 minutes or even less. Remember, you don’t need to bleach forever anymore.

2. Add the chopped red onions – this is the ewa aganyin part of the stew

3. Let the onions burn

Scoop out the onions and take it off the heat, so it doesn’t continue heating up. I tried scooping out the onions with a spoon but it was proving annoying, so i got out a small sieve

Ewa Aganyin bit of it still continuing

4. Add the pepper and let it fry for a bit till you start to see oil bubble up - you should have pre boiled the pepper till it gets thick

5. From the picture below, you can see that the pepper has a fried look with oil bubbles. Now add the beef stock, then the waiting magic happens. Turn down the heat to the lowest. I’m afraid, lowest.

Let it continue fry, it will take hours. Chinelo’s tip was actually for it to fry overnight. I started this around 7pm and by the time it crossed the 3 hour mark, the flavour started to change. It was so intense, I thought wow, and let it continue frying.

keep frying, by this time it had been frying for almost 6 hours on the lowest heat. Number 1 on my hob. The palm oil had started flowing back to the top. The aroma in my flat was AMAZING. I feel I have to add, it did not burn AT ALL.

keep frying, until the palm oil no longer shows up in patches like the picture above and pools in the middle. I have to add, I have only used stock, no extra salt or seasoning added. I could have added iru at the start, but I wasn’t sure how iru would taste after frying for hours. Not good, I think.

6. Add the meats and assorted meats. I used diced beef, saki, cowleg, offals

7. Add water to give your stew some volume. Not just volume but, enough fluid to allow the meats absorb the flavour of the slow cooked stew. Dooney’s Kitchen Tip: If you add the meats to the stew without water, the flavour of the thickened stew, won’t permeate the fleshy bits. This is where the Buka Stew magic comes in. You also add iru at this point for the exact same reason, I mentioned above. Ayamase inflection also comes in here. See, that I said this is a trilogy of stews.

8. Now the water is in, re-adjust for salt and seasoning and let it boil. As it boils, you would start to see palm oil floating to the top.

See, it is still boiling. The aroma when you get to this stage is better tried than imagined. You would have your household slowly making their way to the kitchen wondering what it is you are cooking.

Keep at it, let it continue cooking, till it darkens. Right now, it is still orangey looking. Dooney’s Kitchen Tip: what you are trying to achieve is a balance of a fried stew that still has volume. Not sure if that makes sense i.e. this is not buka stew that needs to be watery, at the same time not totally well fried ayamase. A happy medium between both.

See what I mean, it has darkened. Do a very deep crimson, fancy word for red

This is exactly what you want. Once you get this, you are done. I told you, this stew is a labour of love, but the good thing is that, you don’t have to be standing there slaving over the stove. Just leave it to work its own magic on its own. Till the end, there wasn’t a single burnt bit. Not a one.

I would have served it in a bowl and plated it all pretty, but I had to go pick up Atoke from the station. Serve this with anything, if you don’t sit down with a spoon and just dig in. Trust me, it was that good, I was tempted.

For breakfast, we served what was left with Ekuru. Recipe for Ekuru (click HERE)

The Ekuru mixture – potash has been added. See the bubbles

Ekuru to be steamed in muffin cups

Breakfast a la Dooney’s Kitchen – applications for houseguest still welcome

The post Dooney’s Red Trilogy Stew appeared first on Dooney's Kitchen.

I am not that adventurous with food when I eat out. My philosophy is this, if I am going to pay for it, even if someone else is paying for it, I will be pissed if i don’t like it. So I stick to my usual. If I hate what i am served, it ruins the entire dining experience. For me, dining out is not just about the food but the experience i.e the decor of the restaurant, the ambience, the smell too, the immaculate tablecloth, sparkly clean dinner service, the efficiency and pleasantness of the wait staff, the company I am dining in and of course the food. Now, get one or two things wrong and everything goes downhill from there.

I have been getting requests to make Shawarma for a while and I really am not a huge fan anymore. I am guessing it’s because the ones I have eaten here have obliterated my memories of the delicious ones I have had in Nigeria. Now, I think Shawarma and go Ugh, with shivers. Besides the best Shawarma I have ever eaten was at a kebab shop in Paris. If you read my Steak au Uziza post, you would have read me mention this kebab shop. Since then, I haven’t eaten shawarma – Xmas 2009, to be precise, I don’t want anything to spoil the memories of the one from Paris. Then came a work dinner do I went to last week and Mediterranean Greek style food was on the menu. I am still a little so so about Greek food. Don’t love it, but don’t hate it either. I like Tzatziki though, when it is done well. This time I decided to try Tahini sauce just because I saw it as a list of ingredients in Esther W’s Shawarma on Facebook.

Without reading that post, I know for sure I would never have tried Tahini Sauce that day. For me to go adventurous with food in a restaurant, something about it must intrigue me. I found that it was okay but I sat down there and said to myself, I know just how to make it better. I quickly took down notes on my phone for when I did make it. And make it I did. Loved playing around with the flavours, and I would like to invite the sous chef of that restaurant to come taste mine. Waaaaaaay better than his/hers for sure.

So, what is Tahini? It is basically a paste made from blending Sesame seeds with oil. That’s all. For my readers in Nigeria, before you go scratching your head about sesame seeds, we have it locally homegrown. It is called Beniseed. Isasa in Yoruba, Ridi in Hausa and Ekuku in Igbo. Tahini is the base for many dips such as humus and tahini sauce, you can mix it in with butter, make a dressing out of it with citrus juice, zest, honey, veggies, the list is endless. I will be discussing Tahini Sauce in the next post. Believe me, you want to read that one too. Deeeeeeeeeeeelicious, and fresh, and green and zingy.

You will need

1/2 cup Sesame seeds - isaa, beniseed, ridi, ekuku

4 tbs sunflower oil - or any oil of your choice

How To

1. Spread out the sesame seeds on a baking tray

2. Place in the oven and set at 190 degrees centigrade (375 Fahrenheit) for roughly 8 minutes. You could stretch it to 10, but make sure the seeds don’t get brown. Dooney’s Kitchen Tip: By the 5 minute mark, when you take a quick peek at it, you would notice that the natural oils of the sesame seeds have been released and the sesame seeds stick to your fingers. 

By the 8 minute mark, the aroma wafting from the oven is just gorgeous. Nutty, earthy crisp. You would want to eat it directly from the tray, and you should. Toasted sesame seeds are fabulously tasty.

see, you don’t want the sesame seeds browned, just toasted enough to release its natural oils and crunch up a bit. By the way, cooking with Sesame seed oil rocks by the way. In salads too, uhmmmmn, yum, yum.

3. Pour into a food processor, add the oil and blend till it forms a smooth paste

Ta daaaaaaa. As sesame seeds are also native to Nigeria, I guess we can rename this is we want. What do you guys think?

…………Here’s your Tahini paste ready to be whipped into anything you wish.

As this is the run up to Easter weekend, be prepared for a daily dose of goodness from Dooney’s Kitchen to fill you up with ideas for your Easter party

The post Tahini appeared first on Dooney's Kitchen.

Of course, I just wrote about Tahini in the last post (click HERE), the next obvious thing would be Tahini Sauce. People, you NEED to try this, like seriously. It’s fresh, clean, tangy, green and absolutely gorgeous. If only I can pack it up in a jar and send it to that sous chef, I just may be tempted to, but as it is food, it likely won’t be touched anyway, so this is for you guys who have had Tahini sauce in a restaurant or bought it in a jar, believe me, making it at home is much better. This is much better.

This Easter, ditch, the mayo, ditch, the ketchup, ditch the salad cream. Serve Tahini sauce and have everyone asking you ooooh, what’s that sauce, what’s that dip, they love it, how can they make it, its different, its unusual. Yup, that’s what you will be getting. Serve as a dip with chips or bits of suya or grilled chicken, toss into salad, add honey to it and even kids will love it. Make Tahini sauce your blank canvas and do anything you want with it. It looks great, it smells great, you dip your finger into the sauce bowl and it wouldn’t want to not stop going into it. For a sauce I just got introduced to last week, you can tell my excitement is through the roof. Loooooool.

It is also quite simple to make. You could also flex your host or hostessing skills by making your own mayo from scratch (recipe HERE). I know I said earlier to ditch the mayo, but if you will be making your own from scratch, go for it. With Mayo too, let it be your blank canvas, mix in anything you wish in it, after the creamy bit has set. Unlike Mayo though, Tahini is waaaaay easier. I used a recipe from DeDe Med and added my own twist to it. If you are making Shawarma this Easter, Tahini Sauce is the way to go.

You will need

1/2 cup Tahini paste - recipe for tahini paste HERE

1/3 cup lemon juice

1 clove smoked garlic - you can use plain garlic

1/2 jalapeño - replace with green ata rodo or green chillies

Freshly chopped parsely

A couple of tablespoons of water - depending on how thick or watery you want it

Salt

Spring onions

How To

if you’ve never cooked with smoked garlic before, OMG you should. Saw it for the first time at my local supermarket and picked it up. Geez, the aroma. Beautiful. If you hate the smell of garlic, use smoked garlic. If you can’t find smoked garlic in your local stores, just whack a whole bulb of garlic in your oven for lets say 10 – 15 minutes.

L-R: chopped parsely, choped jalapeno, minced smoked garlic and spring onion

Tahini paste

See that Tahini paste above, with its consistency like very fluid peanut butter and tan coloured? When you whisk it with lemon juice, it transforms into a creamy consistency and the colour changes to off white. Kicking myself for not taking a picture at the beginning. I was on the phone, but you don’t need a picture really. just dump in the tahini paste with lemon juice and whisk. You will get the same thing I got. Mind you, this was my first time making it too, so you’ll do fine.

It has the creamy consistency of Mayo now. You can choose to leave it as it is or add water to make it more fluid i.e. salad cream consistency. Start with 2 tablespoons of water and work your way up from there. The more water you add, the more fluid it gets.

Also add the finely chopped jalapeño (substitute with green ata rodo or green chillies), finely chopped garlic and chopped parsley. Finish off by seasoning with salt to taste. This is important, I think. It goes from 6/10 to 10/10 after you season with salt.

…………..and that’s your Tahini Sauce.

Garnish with cut spring onions. Creamy, white, clean fresh, green, zesty, don’t you just want a bite of that?

Imagine dipping your Suya into it or Grilled Chicken or Yamarita or Plantain Chips. YUM!!!

For team #fitfam, if you’ve been feeling neglected in the sauces and dips department because of your diet, well, you don’t have to miss out anymore. This is healthier and fresher for you than the standard traditional sauces and dips. Go for it. You will be very glad you did. I guess we can conveniently name this Beniseed sauce, flavour of 9ja, what do you guys think?

The post Tahini Sauce appeared first on Dooney's Kitchen.

Finally Shawarma is on the blog. I know so many of you who have written to ask me to do this must be breathing a huge sigh of relief right now. Sorry for the delay, I heard you guys loud and clear but just needed a push to finally convince me to do it, as I am no longer a huge fan of shawarma. Something I don’t enjoy eating, I find it hard to cook because eating to me is an experience. I had a friend who just didn’t get what that meant. To him, food is food, you are hungry, you eat, you take a drink on to the next meal. No matter how hard I tried to explain it, I guess with food, there are two camps. Those who live to eat and those who eat to live. I am Camp 1 for sure, but not in the stuffing your face bit but actually looking forward to my meal, thinking about it in my head, enjoying making it, savouring the aromas, serving on a plate, getting to the table or sofa in most cases, taking that first bite, then the next and the next, plate empty, I’m very well satisfied, off to plunk the plate in the sink. Food and eating is not just for sustenance, but it is an art of its own, comparable to a musical symphony. Yes, I said so. We true foodies, will know exactly what I am talking about. hehehehehe

Now, when it is food I don’t like, I don’t get to experience all those feelings and it truly does leave me unsatisfied because I love to eat. I may not look like I do for those who have met me but believe me, I looooooove to eat. I would rather go hungry for 12 hours+ than eat something I detest. So, you can imagine my apprehension when I kept getting requests for Shawarma. On Sunday, I decided to take it head on and suddenly I remembered why I never really liked the ones served at some places in Lagos and Abuja. The guilty party was the Chicken. The flipping Chicken. Shawarma is basically a wrap made with veggies, your choice of meats, chicken or fish and dressing. Now, I am not a veggie person, not a huge fan of salads, but if you throw in meat or chicken into a salad, I will gladly eat it, hoping against hope that the meat, chicken or fish at least tastes great, making up for eating veggies. Many times, I have been faced with bland or dry tasting chicken which just ruins the entire wrap for me, nothing for my taste buds to look forward to. So, when I was going to make this, I called upon all my Food Network knowledge of cooking chicken breasts and I nailed it. Jamie Oliver himself would have been proud. Hehehehehehehe.

As this is Chicken Shawarma, it would be bereft of me not to give you a quick tutorial on How to Cook Chicken Breasts. This is the only “cooking” needed for this recipe any way. Here goes

You will need

Chicken Breasts

Salt

Seasoning cube

Curry Powder

Dried Thyme

Onion Powder

Garlic salt

Crushed chillies – roughly ground dried shombo

Lemon Juice

Water

For the Wrap

Flat bread

Tomatoes

Red Onions

Cabbage

Lettuce – optional: not a huge fan of lettuce, so I left it out

Julienne Carrots

Tatashe – red bell pepper

Jalapeno – for the heat, you can substitute with green chillies of ata rodo

Dry Pepper

Mayonnaise

Ketchup

Salad cream – optional

Foil Paper

How To

Dooney’s Kitchen Lesson in cooking Chicken Breasts

1. Season the chicken breasts to your taste preferences and leave in the fridge to marinade for 30 – 45 minutes.

2. Add 2 tablespoons of oil to a frying pan or griddle pan if you choose to grill it and allow it to get very hot. Take the chicken breasts out of the fridge and place in the pan.

Allow it to sear for 2 minutes. 1 minute in, take a sharp knife and make incisions on the chicken breast to allow the heat to penetrate deep into the flesh

Flip over and allow the other part to sear for another 2 minutes, repeating the incisions in the step above.

3. Now, both sides have seared, flip again for another 2 minutes on each side.

Chicken breasts are notorious for being dry. For some recipes, you are even advised to stuff it with moisture creating ingredients like lemon butter, to keep it nice and moist. I wasn’t headed in that route, but you could if you wish.

Dooney’s Kitchen Tip: If your chicken breast are small and flat, 4 minutes on each side should do. That’s it. Take it off the heat, let it rest for 2 – 4 minutes i.e. half the time you cooked it with before serving, to allow the flesh to release the juices again – Food Network Tip. If you have the size I am cooking with, 4 minutes on each side may not be enough to cook it all through, cos the insides will still be raw pink. Not to worry, place that frying pan in the oven under medium heat (180 degrees centigrade) and let the oven cook it slowly. In an enclosed oven, the chicken breast will be kept moist and cook slowly. It only needs to be in the oven for another 3 minutes or so.

Before it went into the oven, to keep it extra moist, I added lemon juice and water. Just brilliant.

look closely at the picture, you would see water in the pan. it is just about to enter the oven

What came out was just perfect. Perfect, perfect, perfect. The flesh was white, tender and very very moist. The lemon juice gave it quite a kick and a nice touch. See, I took a close shot. See how moist it is.

If you have been haven’t been creating the perfect chicken breast, try my method next time and see.

4. Take the chicken breasts out of the hot pan and slice longitudinally on a chopping board, set aside and leave it to rest.

5. While the chicken is in the oven, continue chopping and prepping the veggies.

6. Get your flat bread and heat it up on a recently turned off hob. You could also do it it on the lowest heat if you have a gas burner. I saw them do this in Marrakech. This is just to toast the outer side of the flat bread nicely.

7. Spread out foil paper, place the toasted flat bread on it.

Lay over the veggies, in whatever order you wish. I started with carrots and cabbage, followed by tomatoes, tatashe (red bell pepper), red onion rings and jalapeno.

Don’t over fill.

8. Place the sliced chicken breasts on top, scoop on Mayo and Ketchup. Despite using crushed chillies for the chicken, it wasn’t hot enough and I remembered that there was a particular shawarma place that I loved in Abuja which used dry pepper to give it extra kick. At the last-minute, I sprinkled on dry pepper.

9. Roll the wrap gently. If you filled the wrap too much, you may have some problems with rolling, jut do it carefully and you will be fine.

10. Once rolled, wrap with the foil paper. Alternatively, you can roll the wrap with the foil paper from the start, saving you from doing it twice.

Once the wrap is rolled in foil, tuck in the ends, place on an oven tray and grill in the oven for 5 – 7 minutes. At 200 degrees centigrade. I extended it to 7 minutes, because I wanted it really hot. Alternatively you can place the wrap rolled in foil in a griddle and turn every 2 minutes or so. If you have those griddle that close upon themselves, even better. Another option would be to heat it up the wrap in a frying pan. Remember to use the foil covering though, just to protect the filling from spilling out.

11. 7 minutes later, I unwrapped the foil and my gorgeous chicken shawarma was staring at me. The mayo had melted nicely with the ketchup and chicken. The veggies were still crunchy, but they were warm (hate cold veggies).

I dug in immediately, and then remembered why you don’t totally unwrap the foil covering of the shawarma. The filling kept spilling out in bits with each bite, but I scooped it straight into my mouth. Looooooool. Best  Chicken Shawarma ever. The moist chicken breasts truly made it.

See how moist and creamy and delicious it looked

This filled me up nicely. Only meal of the day and I wanted to go straight to sleep.

I had one more chicken breast, so for Monday’s dinner, I decided to repeat my shawarma experience, but this time, heating the flat bread in a pan till it browned. Unfortunately left it in for too long while doing dishes. Don’t make that mistake.

If you do, this is what is going to happen to your lovely flat bread when it comes to folding

It has now turned crisp, it would break

Remember not to keep it in the pan for too long

If you still want crunchy flat bread shawarma, not to worry, heat it up in the pan after wrapping.

Then goes left over chicken breast

then goes the ketchup

then goes the mayo. This time, I decided to add a little salad cream to it. Loved, loved it.

sprinkling on the dry pepper

Now, you place in a pan to heat or grill pan. Remember those hot slabs in Shawarma joints, well your home frying pan is just re-creating the dry heat effect

Ta daaaa……………………………….crispy crunchy chicken Shawarma.

You can decide to still put it back in the oven, just because the few minutes in the pan would not be enough to warm the chicken and vegetables through. Hot food eater alert. Just 5 minutes in the oven and Perfect.

Here’s your Browned and Crispy Shawarma.

You can also decide to go White and Soft. Your choice

So, there’s your Nigerian Chicken Shawarma. Try it out this Easter.

The post Nigerian Chicken Shawarma appeared first on Dooney's Kitchen.

First of all, Hi Five if you were raised by an Ijebu Grandmother. Honestly, we need to have our own fan club or something, because it is truly a privilege to have or in my case, to have had an Ijebu grandmother in your life. Whichever part of Ijebuland, your grandmother was from, please happily join the fan club. I got a good friend of mine Yemi Oladipo, who we fondly call Mama Yemi to make this poster. Mama Yemi has all sorts of talents, did I tell you she has 5 beautiful girls who are super brainy and talented too. I am sure one or two of them plus her came up with this poster. Big hugs Mama Yemi, I appreciate you.

I am always, always, looking to add stew recipes to the blog. I think the Nigerian Red Stew is one of the most underrated of our dishes and I am glad, I have been able to showcase it in different ways. Who said stew has to be boring?

Why is it named Mama Adeola’s stew? Well, this recipe was gotten from Olusola Sanni and this is his grandmother’s recipe. I saw the picture of stew on Facebook, it looked nice, scrolled on by and forgot about it. Then I saw it on again 2 days after on top of the news feed. Clicked on the comments and saw the recipe. The very first thing that came to my mind were words in Yoruba (yes, I think in Yoruba sometimes, lol). ‘Obe arugbo, lobe yi, Obe Iya Ijebu pa pa. In English – I can spy an old woman’s touch in this. Like a very old woman. An Ijebu woman for that matter. My foodie spider senses were really buzzing because it reminded me of my grandmothers Alapa Stew. While Iye Gbuyi used Iru and Smoked Fish, Mama Adeola used Iru and Stockfish powder. I didn’t even know that Sola was a He, and I also didn’t read the caption atop the picture. When I scrolled back up again and read the caption, I saw Ijebu Ode, my grand mum. BOOM!!!! You can’t imagine the whoop, whoop I said out loud. I was Corrrrrrrrrrect. I swear those Ijebu grandmothers must know each other somehow or have some town hall meeting we the younger generation didn’t know about.

What also made me want to try it was because of something Sola wrote, which my mum has always said, and which she too picked up from her mum (Iye Gbuyi). Your Pepper selection. My mother drummed this into my ears from very early on. The secret to any great tasting stew is your pepper selection. No two ways about it. When the pepper is boiling, you will already get a fairly accurate hint of what the end result will taste like. This is evident when you make Buka Stew. It starts from the pepper selection, so when I saw Sola write the same thing too, I thought Hi five, you were raised by an Ijebu Grandmother. We know ourselves. Looooooooool. LIke with Buka Stew too, Palm Oil and Vegetable Oil was used. This recipe was so up my alley, I knew cooking it would be a breeze. But first things first, I sent him a message, asking for permission to not just try out the recipe, but blog about it. Very important. He agreed, even added a couple of extra tips about bleaching the palm oil and I was good to go. So, while you scroll through the recipe below, If you have Ijebu blood flowing through your veins from a grandmother connection. Hi Five to you. Our grandmamma’s threw it down in the kitchen and we were fed with very good food, it defined our taste buds. This is why it irritates me when I hear ignorant sentences like Yoruba women cannot cook. Really?????? How many Yoruba women have you met?

Since Easter is upon us, I decided what’s the best time than this to introduce another stew. Especially as I know many would have been discouraged from attempting my Trilogy Stew due to the duration of cooking. Well, here is an amazing alternative. Something to wow your guests. I amended bits and bobs of Sola’s recipe.

You will need

6 – 7 pieces of Tatashe

5 ripe tomatoes Tomatoes

5 pieces of Ata rodo - habanero pepper/scotch bonnet

1 and a half pieces of red Onions

2 cooking spoons of Ground crayfish

3 cooking spoons of Ground Stockfish Powder

2 heaped tbs of Iru

Palm OIl

Sunflower oil - or your choice of cooking oil

Smoked Goat Meat with the skin on

Goat Meat Stock

Salt

Seasoning cubes

As mentioned before, this recipe is quite easy peasy. If you are familiar with stew recipes already on the blog, this just switches things up a little, to delicious results. No one prepared me for chomping up bits of stockfish to grind into a powder though. Sheeeeesh. I wanted to give up and cheat, but for the sake of whose recipe it was, an Ijebu woman, I had to pay respects and follow it to the letter. If you have no such qualms, I will list a cheat way out to save you from the hassle.

He also wrote about grinding the pepper the traditional way using a stone. Errrrrrr, sorry Mama Adeola, ain’t no way in *cough* *cough* is that going to happen, even if I had access to one. I love being a woman in 2014, I love being a cook in 2014. In the words of John Legend – “love your curves and all your edges, all your perfect imperfections (love that song ‘All of Me’ by the way). Dooney’s Kitchen equivalent, with the melody humming in my head, “Love my gadgets and my devices, all their stress free perfections. Hehehehehehehehe.

How To

1. Rinse and season your Goat meat with salt and seasoning cubes. Bring your Goat Meat to boil and cook to soften. Sola’s Tip: he recommended using goat meat for this and I so agree. I even took it further by using smoked goat meat with the skin on. The real ‘ogunfe’ as Yoruba people call it. You also need to start on this the day before you cook the stew to allow the goat meat absorb more flavour from its own stock. I made this the night before.

2. Prepare the stockfish powder. Dooney’s Kitchen Tip; to save yourself the trouble the next day, better do this now, trust me. Here’s my experience:

I flaked off bits of the head of stockfish because as my Igbo people say, that is the real ‘okporoko’. The head has more flavour than the rest of the body. Sola’s mum does not agree. They have thiis argument all the time, and he knows he can cook better than her. In his words “she gave up the competition 4 years ago” Hahahahahahahaha. Sola is a caterer by the way and cooks amazing food, you need to see his pictures. Free advert for you Bros, honestly, I should start charging people for a mention. Hehehehehehehehehe.

I sat down with this thing at stupid o’clock in the early hours of the morning battling with to flake the meaty bits. Sheeeesh, even after managing to flake some, with a powerful mill from a food processor 850W, not all the pieces ground into a fine powder. I had to pass it through a mesh sieve to get the powder. Stockfish is gangster. I bow. Those Norwegians sure know how to dry the hell out of fish. You didn’t know Stockfish came from Norway? Oh yes it does. Big shame on Nigeria. To avoid this stress, please just boil your goat meat with stockfish, and also add that boiled stockfish to the stew from scratch. Problem solved. You still get the flavour without fighting with an inanimate animal. Lol

That’s your prepping done for the day. You could also blend the iru and ingredients for the pepper mixture you need and place in the fridge. To blend, you only need a very rough blend. Remember, we are 2014 cooks, and we are only mimicking the gruelling grind stone method (ugh, the thought gives me shivers). Dooney’s Kitchen Tip: only keep the engine running for a few seconds at a time and don’t over fill the blender, otherwise the bottom bits will get a smooth blend, while the top will be rough. Sola’s Cooking Tip:you don’t need to pre-boil the pepper.

D-day for cooking is here, as you can see, the goat meat has been chilling nicely in its own stock. You can choose to scrape off the fat if you wish.

3. Take out the goat meat and fry or Grill. for the first time since I made Alapa, I fried meat. I wanted to go with Mama Adeola’s recipe. I will be grilling next time

4. Heat up 3  – 4 cooking spoons of palm oil in a pot to bleach it, and by bleach it Sola’s Cooking Tip: you only need to bleach the palm oil to the point it begins to darken, but still retains undertones of orange i.e. don’t bleach till it turns black as you would do with Ayamase. He suggested to do a white paper test.

See, the palm oil has darkened but with orange highlights

white paper test. Brown but still orangey

5. Pour in the ground crayfish and stockfish powder.

allow to fry for 2 – 3 minutes

you would start to see the palm oil foam and you will smell the intense flavour of the crayfish and stockfish powders frying. A very native smokey, fishey flavour. Dooney’s Kitchen Tip: Stir and be careful not to let it burn.

6. Add the pepper to the pot and sunflower oil used to fry the goat meat. If you grilled your meat instead, just pour oil from the bottle into the pot and let it fry for a bit. Roughly 7 – 10 minutes.

Then add the stock and let it fry for another 5 minutes. By then, the pepper should start to show signs of the beginning of the fried stew look, but it is not yet ready.

With further time on medium heat, it fries more and starts to resemble thickly fried stew. See how roughly ground the pepper is. Grinding stone who?

7. You know it is time to add the goat meat, when oil floats back to the top and pepper stock bubbles are pooling in the middle i.e. the more watery bits of the pot

see what I mean

8. The meats are in now, cover the pot, leave it on medium heat and just walk away and leave it to do its thing. It will further fry and keep reducing. Further 15 minutes in, open the pot and you should have this pale orangey stew will lots and lots of water bubbles scattered all over the place. What i noticed when I got to this stage was that the oil sta on top like a film, while the bubbles were kinda poking through. Unlike with other stews where the oil floats around on top in patches.

I went to take a peek at Sola’s picture and yup. Mine looked exactly like that. In retrospect, I think it is because I added more vegetable oil than palm oil because the filmy on the surface look is characteristic of cooking with transparent oils, as they don’t have the same density and weight unlike Palm oil.

By this point, you are done. Believe it or not, your stew has fried. All you need to do is stir and you would see the rich pebbly look that is so characteristic of well fried stew, or as Yoruba people say ‘obe din din’ or ‘obe ata din din’.

See what I mean?

To really appreciate the glorious beauty of this stew, I implore you to serve in a white bowl.

and watch your friends and family go Aaaaaah, lovely stew. Get me rice please

The aroma, trust me, you want to make this. The Iru is there, but it is not strong like with Ayamase. The harmony of the ground crayfish and stockfish, true symphony.

The stew has this fine smell like this, very attractive. Don’t you just want to eat that with rice?

To even get it more authentic Ijebu, serve with Ofada Rice atop of moin moin leaves. I tell you, I was a very happy bunny last night. If you live in the UK, it is not too late to order Clevenard Ofada rice for Easter. At £4.49 for 1kg, this is not inclusive of the 10% discount for Dooney’s Kitchen readers, it is truly a steal. To order Ofada rice online, click HERE

The post Mama Adeola’s Stew appeared first on Dooney's Kitchen.

I realised yesterday that I hadn’t blogged in a week. I had some personal ish to take care of, besides it felt good to take a break while making and following up on plans for expansion. Have a bad case of the flu this weekend but decided to type this up during the short window of time the paracetamol and peppersoup are working their magic, before it’s back to lying down and feeling crappy when their effect wears off. Today, I am bringing you something exciting to try this weekend, a new twist on our well-known and loved Yam Pottage.

I made this for a client months ago as part of my Meal Drop off Service. When she sent me an email with Yam Pottage on the list, I told myself, Dunni, do something different with this. Anyone in the food business reading this must be thinking, huh? Try something different for a client service. Why would you take such a risk? What if it didn’t turn out great, experiments are best left for food for your mouth and your mouth alone. While in a way that may be true, but I always welcome a food challenge. Because I know it is for a client, I dot all my i’s and cross my t’s when experimenting, and this one did not disappoint at all. I am sure she tasted it and probably is still wondering what I put in it that made it so different.

Food Fusion should be my motto, re-inventing Nigerian food is what I love to do, and I thought to myself, I need to make Yam Pottage more fragrant. The flavour of smoked fish is not enough, yes you can also use aromatic vegetables like Uziza or Efinrin but I wanted something different. It should still look like Yam Pottage but with that something extra, that kick, especially from a strange place. Oh, I ruminated on many ideas, I was about to give up, then I spied Lemon grass in the vegetable section of the fridge. Ding! Ding! Ding!. I swear, for a second there, I thought, Dunni you are just cray cray. Lemon grass in Yam Pottage, with all the flavours of the smoked fish, pepper, crayfish and uziza, hmmmmn, be careful o. The naughty side of me shrugged off any reservations and I went for it. Oh my goodness, it was good, people, it was better than good. This is Yam Pottage like you have never tasted before, trust me. I was so sad to let it all go. You see, for my Meal Drop off Service, depending on the size you order, it has a fixed amount of 500ml bowls, so as I was scooping it into the bowls, a part of me was wringing my hands, hoping I would get some left for myself. Alas, no such thing. All that was left were miserly tablespoonfuls. I was not a happy bunny at all. I know it was not a fluke, it will still taste great the next time I make it, so I will just wait till then and enjoy a massive pot of Thailand meets 9ja in Yam Pottage.

Lemon grass is undoubtedly Thai. It brings a sourness and an aroma to the dish that is simply sublime. The aroma, people, the aroma. If you have ever tried my Coconut Rice recipe, you will know EXACTLY what I am talking about. Better rush to buy Lemon grass in the supermarket this weekend and try it out. You won’t go back to bland boring tasting Yam Pottage again. If you live in Nigeria, the closest thing to lemon grass probably would be Achara, sold by the Igbo vegetable sellers in the market. I could be wrong, but the little I have read about Achara, and the fragrant way it was described, I think, I think it could be close to lemon grass. I believe I have explained the ingredients, now let’s get to cooking.

You will need

1 medium tuber of yam
Boiled and blended mixed pepper - the volume you need will depend on the size of the yam and how much yam pottage you intend to make
Smoked Fish and Fish stock
Handful of chopped Uziza
Palm Oil
1 stalk of Lemon grass
Beef Stock
Crayfish
Smoked red prawns
Chopped Kale or Ugu

How To

1. Heat up palm oil in a pot, add chopped onions, pour in the pepper and beef stock. Allow it to fry properly. In this pot, my pepper mix compresses off Tatashe (red bell pepper), rd onion, enough ata rodo (scotch bonnet/habanero pepper) and a little tomatoes. Dooney’s Kitchen Tip: I should probably state here that you may do yam pottage differently, by making it a one pot dish, pouring everything into the pot and letting it cook till it thickens. I do mine slightly differently. I fry the pepper first in Palm oil and make sure it is well fried, as we all know, fried pepper is intensely delicious. I have another recipe for Yam and Plantain Pottage. Click HERE for the recipe

2. Allow the pepper to fry properly till it thickens

3. While the pepper is frying, boil your smoked fish with a little water and a pinch of salt. Dooney’s Kitchen Tip: this is to soften the fish and also generate some fish stock for use.

Now you should have your fish stock and your fried pepper. Lower the heat on both and proceed to peeling the Yam tuber and cut in big enough cubes

4. In one pot, combine the fried pepper, fish stock, smoked red prawns, ground crayfish, cubed yam, salt, adjust for seasoning cubes if needed and enough water to slightly cover the yam, with enough room for the top bits to peek out.

Add the stalk of Lemon grass or Achara and cover the pot

5. Leave it cook and boil. In about 10minutes or under, you will notice that the stock has started to thicken, you should also smell the Lemon grass or Achara.

6. You need to allow the stock to thicken while the yam also cooks through. By the time you can feel the yam softening, using a wooden spoon, break up the big chunks one yam into smaller chunks, while you try to mash some of the smaller chunks to further thicken the  stock. Dooney’s Kitchen Tip The more you mash, the thicker it becomes. Personal preference will come into play here. Some like yam pottage really thick and creamy with chunks of yam, others like it watery

7. Once you’ve gotten the consistency that you want, add the smoked fish, more crayfish if you wish, chopped Kale or Ugu, and salt (if needed).

don’t forget the chopped Uziza leaves. if you can’t find Uziza, use Basil instead

Cover the pot and lower the heat, to allow the extra flavours combine beautifully for a few more minutes. 2 – 3 max and that’s your Yam Pottage done. Open the pot and savour the aroma. Just take a few seconds to take it all in. That aroma, I repeat, that aroma. The subtle lemon grass, combining with the smoked fish, uziza and crayfish. A true symphony of Nigerian and Asian flavours, all in one pot. Do yourself even more justice by making this a tad spicy. Oooooooh, wicked, wicked, wicked.

Here’s a shot of the Chunky bit

Here’s the creamy bit

Serve, by sprinkling over the top extra bits of chopped Kale

The post Thai fragrant Yam Pottage appeared first on Dooney's Kitchen.

I wrote about Coconut Rice many moons ago. On the post, I remember writing about my disagreement with using coconut in Jollof rice because the flavour of the Coconut gets lost amongst the bold flavours of pepper and the powerhouse spices used in Jollof Rice. A couple of readers, didn’t share in that ideology and kept telling me to try it out for myself and see. Well, for Easter Sunday, try it out I did and I was correct. Coconut does add something extra to the overall taste of the Jollof rice, but in the sense that you will smell and taste Coconut in the rice on first bite, I humbly stick with my initial stance, but, you know with me, there will come a but, and by but, I mean there is a way around this. If I didn’t sleep cook this Jollof Rice it would have occurred to me way before I was almost done cooking the rice, but oh well, I will pass on the tips to you guys regardless. You guys, should please try it out and let me know.

I had a massive cleanup the 2 days preceding Easter, I was fagged out by Sunday. My neighbour and I planned to do a potluck Easter Sunday Lunch, and my contribution was Coconut Jollof Rice and Coleslaw. I told myself I would take a 30minute quick nap on the sofa, and resume cooking. Oh dear, I woke up 3 hours later, flew to the kitchen and started cooking. By this time it was coming on 3pm, so Lunch was over. My brain wasn’t actively registering what I was doing, I was just cooking by rote routine. If not for experience, my massive pot of Jollof Rice would have been a disaster. A huge soggy mess, which I quickly had to shake off the cobwebs from my eyes and fix it. Scooping out liquid from the rice before it cooked through. Two things, I picked up when my faculties were with me, were this:

• To get that Coconut flavour in your Jollof Rice, do the pre boiling of the rice entirely with Coconut Milk or at least, in a ratio of 3:1 with water. To think, I had 2 spare cans of Coconut MIlk at home, my sleepy self thought one can would be enough.

• #Tip2: This I picked up quite coincidentally when I was reheating the rice to take to Funmi’s. With Party Jollof Rice, my recipe says let it burn right? With Coconut Jollof Rice, double that time. Trust Me. You know why? Think Coconut Candy, think Baba Dudu, think Shuku Shuku (coconut rock cookie). It still hasn’t sunk in yet? Okay, okay, it is the caramelisation of the Coconut. Still don’t get it? The longer Coconut gets to interact with heat, with some “burning” involved, the stronger its flavour. Coconut has a very strange reaction with heat. At the beginning of cooking, you will smell and taste it without question. Midway through cooking, you almost lose it, with further cooking, if many ingredients are involved, it disappears completely. It was when I was re-heating the Coconut Rice for dinner at Funmi’s that I actually started to smell it when the rice was burning. My friend who came around after I cooked the Jollof Rice didn’t notice the Coconut in it. The entire flat was smelling of Party Jollof rice. It was after I told her to please re-heat the Jollof Rice while I take a shower that she said Dunni huh? Is there Coconut in that Jollof Rice? BOOM!!!!

I tested my theory again while re-heating the small bit of rice I used to take plating pictures. I let it burn, and voila, I could smell and taste caramelised Coconut in the Jollof Rice. It does truly add that something special to your party Jollof Rice. Here’s how

You will need

Easy Cook Rice
Tatashe - red bell pepper
Tomatoes
Tomato paste or Tomato puree - I used the Derica Brand
Onions
Curry Powder
Dried Thyme
Ginger
Chopped Carrots
Chopped Runner beans - green beans
Beef Stock
White Pepper
Vegetable Oil - I used sunflower oil

How To

1. As per usual. Blend your pepper with enough ginger, that you can smell it, boil your pepper, heat up oil in a pot, add chopped onions, curry powder and thyme. Fry the onions till it softens, add the reduced pepper and tomato paste Fry till it thickens. Add enough beef stock, and let it boil and bubble away. Adjust for salt and seasoning cubes.

this time, I exclusively used my homemade seasoning cubes. To know how I made the seasoning cubes, click HERE

2. While the pepper is doing its thing, proceed to washing the rice with cold water. Wash and wash and wash with cold water, until the water runs clear. Any cloudiness, still indicates the presence of excess starch. Dooney’s Kitchen Tip: because this is coconut jollof rice, I am washing the rice first, as I am boiling the rice with coconut. Ordinarily, for Party Jollof Rice, I wash the rice after it has cooked to al dente.

Now, you have your well washed rice, pour into a pot and cover the top with enough coconut milk just to barely cover the rice. Remember, this is important, because you are not cooking the rice all through. Pepper sauce is still coming

see what I mean about the water/coconut milk level. Ignore the runner beans in the image. This was me sleep cooking. I was transposing my mother’s method of cooking runner beans with the rice for fried rice. Adding runner beans now, is way too early.

3. Once the rice has cooked al dente i.e. cooked but still firm, pour in the pepper sauce, and stir. Leave it to cook. Midway in, add the carrots and runner beans, adjust for salt and seasoning if necessary. Sorry, no picture here. If you need a visual reminder, click on my party Jollof rice recipe HERE.

4. With time, you would notice the rice grains have absorbed the pepper sauce, and is cooking along nicely, but not quite there yet i.e. totally softened. If you have no more liquid peeking out, just grab foil paper, place over the rice, tuck it in nicely and let it cook, plus burn. Dooney’s Kitchen Tip: As it cooks through plus you letting it burn, stir every few minutes or so. This is to let the caramelising coconut flavour, emanating from the bottom of the pot, mix well with the contents of the top. You have to repeat this stirring cycle quite a number of times. You will start to smell the coconut yourself by the 2nd or third stirring cycle. 

5. Add in sliced onions and tomatoes. Give another final stir and lower the heat. Keep the pot there, even till you serve. Sorry, you will have a whole lot of washing to do afterwards, but you will get that Coconut flavour you need.

…and that’s your Coconut Jollof Rice. I garnished with round spring onions and carrots

Served in a Coconut Shell, just completes the look

For the Peppered Chicken, I made it on easy street. I just tossed the grilled chicken into the leftover pepper sauce for the Jollof rice. Added a little water, stirred, lowered the heat and let it combine. For Garnish, I threw in roughly chopped tatashe (red bell pepper) and onions.

For the Coleslaw, easy peasy too. Shredded and grated cabbage and carrots in the food processor. Thank you Mr Kenwood. It took all of 2 minutes.

Combined with mayonnaise, salad cream and a little bit of sugar. Stirred around and that’s it.

The post Coconut Jollof Rice appeared first on Dooney's Kitchen.

This was breakfast for my house guest a few days ago. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if it would work. I had it in my head for ages to make a veggie egg stew. My plan was to use a fragrant herb or vegetable, then one day on Facebook, I saw a picture where someone used Kale, and I thought hmmmn, now that would work too. Other options would be explored later. I wanted to throw something in the mix i.e. something in between the Kale and the eggs. You see, my mum made egg stew in two different ways. One way was to use leftover stew, the other was to sweat down several chopped veggies into a thick stewy sauce and then add the eggs. I have the recipe for her other method of egg stew HERE.

A few weeks ago, my starving self wandered over to my neighbour’s house. It was one of those 14 hour work days. I got to work before 7am to rush in to dial into a conference call and time zone constraints also meant I did not leave work until 9.30pm that day. I was beyond tired and hungry. One of those moments you are sure you drove home on auto pilot. Funmi graciously offered to feed me. She made this freshly prepared Semovita and Oiless Seafood Okro soup, with enough seafood, competing with the okro. Out of sheer hunger, I basically inhaled the food. I was almost done before it sunk in that there was something strange in that soup. Strange, but delicious. I asked her what it was and she said Monk fish. Never had Monk fish in my life before. I am not a fish lover in any way. I rarely venture outside my well-known ones like Tuna Steaks, Swordfish Steaks and Croaker. I grudgingly tolerate Tilapia, but the bones still scare me to death. Discovered Grouper on a holiday to The Algarve, in Portugal, love that too but somehow I can’t seem to find it here in the UK. Anyway, that sums up my fish dictionary, so when I heard her say Monk fish, I nodded my head in appreciation but my tired self didn’t register it.

I sauntered back home, straight into bed, and totally forgot about Monk fish until days after when Funmi told me she was going to our local Fishmongers. Not wanting to miss the opportunity to know where she gets her haul of seafood from, I followed her. It turned out to be a very fruitful trip, and not just because of fish and seafood. Funmi met a close family friend, a much older woman whom she hadn’t seen in almost six years. She had lost the woman’s phone number you see, so you can imagine the joy and surprise on both their faces, to suddenly bump into each other in the most unlikely of places, better still, she also lives in our neighbourhood. Imagine that. Don’t you just love serendipity stories. It even gets better. To be polite, Funmi introduced me to the woman, and said that’s my friend Dunni, she runs a blog. The woman took a good look at me and screamed. You are Dunni of Dooney’s Kitchen. OMG, I have been hoping and praying to meet you one day. OMG, you live in this neighbourhood, no way!!!! She then went on and on to say how much she loves the blog, same with all her friends. This is a woman whose has put children through University. It was so heart warming talking to her. We had such an uplifting and exciting conversation, like talking to a long-lost Big Aunty. She kept saying her best friend (who is also a huge fan of the blog) won’t believe this. She made several attempts to call her friend to tell her she was standing right in front of Dunni of Dooney’s Kitchen, unfortunately, the number just kept ringing. It was lovely, serendipitously meeting a Dooney’s Kitchen reader who lives in my neck of the woods. All because of a trip to the fishmongers. He works in mysterious ways. I will just leave the rest of the story there, lets just say meeting her is an asset to me. That day, it occurred to me that I finally have that thing I wanted to add to my Kale egg stew. It didn’t disappoint at all, after all my mum sometimes served meat and chicken with egg stew. She never dared with fish though, she knew I would not touch it with a barge pole. Here’s my version

You will need

Chopped pieces of Kale - replace with spinach if you live in Nigeria, Ugu may be too chewy, our use leftover Efo riro from dinner the night before
Chunks of Monkfish - replace with smoked Mackerel if you live in Nigeria
Leftover Stew
Chopped red onions
Chopped peppers - optional
Vegetable oil - i used sunflower oil
Eggs - number will depend on how many people you are feeding

How To

1. Using a little oil in a pan, heat it up and add the chopped onions. If you have chopped peppers, also add at this point and sauté lightly till they soften.

2. Add the chopped Monkfish (or Tuna steak pieces, or Grouper, Swordfish or smoked Mackerel) to the pan and let it fry for a little about 2 minutes. Try not to stir, so you don’t break the fish apart

3. Add the leftover stew and it fry gently on low heat. While the stew is frying with the fish, blanch the chopped Kale. Dooney’s Kitchen Tip: you need to pre-blanch the kale because, it would not have cooked sufficiently by the time the eggs have cooked through, so you start the cooking process by blanching the kale, to “pre-cook it”, if that makes sense. If you are using spinach though, still blanch it, to get rid of the raw vegetable taste. Of course, if you are using Leftover Efo riro, just add it to the veggies at this stage

4. Now the stew has fried, add the Kale and stir gently, careful not to break the fish apart.

5. Break the eggs into a bowl, whisk gently and pour into the pan. At this point, leave the eggs undisturbed. Dooney’s Kitchen Tip: Don’t attempt to scramble it at all, until it cooks and is only slightly runny on top. Remember the monk fish, you want to keep as much of the whole chunks of it as possible. It brings some interesting texture to this dish.

6. Once you get to that almost cooked point with the eggs, then with a wooden spoon, you gently scramble. Dooney’s Kitchen Tip: You are also gently breaking the chunks of the fish apart in the process, but you know what, while the eggs were cooking undisturbed, you have let the smokey fishy flavour of the monk fish permeate. Very important this happens. You will even begin to tell by the aroma the pan gives off. 

Once you start to scramble, mid way through, take the pan off the cooker and let the residual heat cook what is left of the eggs. Dooney’s Kitchen Tip: this is to prevent the egg stew from getting dry. You only need enough heat to cook the eggs halfway and then you quickly take it off the heat. Learnt this tip from watching British and French scrambled eggs on TV. We do tend to over cook our eggs in Nigerian cuisine, so picking a leaf out-of-the-way the Brits and French cook theirs is a handy tip, even though I think the Brits and French under cook theirs, to a runny yucky state, but I found a way to get a happy medium. 

………….and that’s your Kale and Monkfish Egg Stew. See the fish peeking out?

What is gorgeous about this, is the multi texture component it has, plus the different facets of flavour. The veggie crunch of the Kale, the slightly chewy smokiness of the Monk Fish, the soft squidgyness of the eggs which has absorbed the flavour of the stew, monkfish and kale. Trust me, this is all shades of delicious. As breakfast, no one will want to leave the table till they have emptied their plates.

To make it even more special, I served it with Oven Grilled, Spicy Plantain. #teamfitfam

Breakfast of Champions, I tell you

Enjoy!!!!!

The post Veggie-Fishy Egg Stew appeared first on Dooney's Kitchen.

What prompted me to do this, well one of you readers gave me a reason to, plus seeing Chef Fregz’s Oatmeal and Edikang Ikong on Bella Naija last week, I left a comment on the post saying I would blog about cooking Oatmeal, but alas the flu had other plans for me last weekend. You see, when I posted my Banga Soup (recipe click HERE) a few weeks ago, I wanted to give the Starch some pizzazz. Due to its nature, it is quite difficult to give starch any shape apart from round. I don’t like being boxed in with food. While making the starch, I kept thinking of how to give it a creative shape. Cookie cutters came to mind, but I could see frustration ahead, so I nipped the idea in the bud. The next idea was to make petal shapes using a mould like I did with my Eba and Egusi Ijebu post (recipe click HERE). Because starch is quite sticky, I added it to a plastic bag first to get a ball shape which I can press into the mould. While turning it around in a plastic bag, I could see that lines were already forming on the starch and the idea was born to follow the natural order of the plastic bag roll, to create tangerine shapes.

Now, this was just harmless fun. I loved the pretty tangerine shapes and thought nothing of it. I posted it on Facebook and got asked how I did it. I responded with, I used a plastic bag and further carved with a knife for more definition. I promised to describe the process when I posted the procedure for making Starch. I didn’t take pictures at the time, I was too busy working fast before the starch got cold and un-malleable. Not knowing that a snitch was hiding in the bushes and rushed to do it and blog about it. Le Sigh. At least with The Eba Roll, I mentioned that it wasn’t my idea, saw it everywhere on Facebook and referenced where I think the idea first came from. Only to get an email from a reader a few days ago. It went thus – “Dunni can you believe that I saw this somewhere else and I kept wondering where I had seen it before. I couldn’t rest until I started searching, then I found your picture of Banga soup and Starch on Instagram and compared the timelines. Hers looks quite nasty by the way”. She sent me the link in her email and continued with “she is also a copycat in lots of ways, you just go look at her blog and wonder how Nigerians just don’t have any shame. Anyone that knows your blog well can see the telltale signs of her copying you. Example, your exact “sausage roll”  explanation for The Eba Roll, even the title of the blog post, the pictures taken, exact angles of the shots. Nawa o). Your way of adding Dooney’s Kitchen Tip in bold and then explain in italics, I can continue listing many examples. Your footprints are everywhere on her blog, go check and see for yourself. Please do a blog post about this Tangerine shape for posterity reasons. Own your work”. It was an interesting email to say the least because you could see that this reader was very angry on my behalf. I can’t even type out all that she wrote. I am too polite. I thanked her and clicked on the link. I was very amused. Sent the link to a friend and we had such a good laugh about it, our belly’s ached. You know yourself, thank you for writing to me. I truly appreciate the support. You have now been appointed my Chief Investigator and I always pay my debts a la The Lannisters of Game of Thrones. Hehehehehehehehehe. Anytime I am in your area, I promise to cook till there is no space in your freezer to store it.

I have seen pictures of people using the shape on Facebook saying oh, thanks Dunni, this was quite easy. Decent thing to do. People inspire me all the time, I mention the source, so it is a good thing to inspire people too, increasing the chain of inspiration, but when yet another food blogger shared his image using that shape with no mention, I just smiled and remembered the words of my mum and so many of you who dropped comments on my New Direction Post. Hey, I am adding more people living in my shadow (mummy’s words). Hehehehehehehe. Y’all know by now that I am very mischievous right? Sorry, can’t help it. Loooooool.

Anyways, if you really don’t have time to make “The Eba Roll”, this one is quick, quick and you would be proud of what you serve. This would also work for starchy solids that have a spring to them like Amala, which may not necessarily do well when rolled. You can also make this with Semovita, Eba, Wheat etc. Joy O. shared very creative shapes with Eba on Facebook and it generated some comments questioning the hygiene of rolling Eba with your hands and the Eba being cold afterwards. Some comments were funny to say the least. I hope this post will help calm the fears of those people. No direct contact with the oatmeal (or eba, amala etc) and this happens so fast, steam will still be coming out when you are done.

Todays post is about cooking the Oatmeal in its original form, I have another post coming soon where the Oatmeal will be ground into a fine powder. I would like to say thank you to the ladies on Facebook who gave me tips on how to cook this for Atoke who expressly told me ahead of time, she would not be eating any traditional starchy solids #teamfitfam. Oatmeal to the rescue. I will also be sharing two ways of making this. First the traditional method and the ridiculously easy modern method.

You will need

Your choice of starchy solid - in my case, oatmeal
Plastic wrap - i used a white bin bag

How To

1. Measure the amount of Oatmeal you would like to cook. You can use any brand you life, e.g. Quaker Oats. By using the oatmeal whole, you are utilising one of the advantages of oats, which is fibre. I also enjoy eating oats in this form because it gives you a full feeling without the heaviness, that you get with starchy solids. Not as light as you would feel after eating amala for example, but it has a semovita feel to it. Not sure if that makes any sense. Eba and Pounded Yam can sometimes feel like you swallowed stone, and they take time to digest, hence the sleepy feeling you sometimes get. None of that with oats. I am not dissing Eba or Pounded Yam please, they are still my favourites to eat with soup, oatmeal just gives a nice healthy change. Summer is coming, this gal wants to break out the crop top and short shorts. Don’t judge me. Loooooool

2. Soak the Oatmeal in cold water. Dooney’s Kitchen Tip: you only need to add enough water that will be absorbed almost completely by the oats, leaving just a little floating on top. This is very essential, otherwise, it won’t solidify quickly enough and you will need to add dry oatmeal, making the texture of the finished produced rough and shaggy. You don’t want that.

First, the easy modern step. I tried this, thanks to my neighbour Funmi. Whack the softened oatmeal into the microwave. Give it 2 minutes at the start, depending on how much you have in there. Take it out and stir. Place in the microwave again for another 1 minus and you are done. No joke. Tried this twice already.

Oatmeal made exclusively in a microwave

For the more traditional method……….

3. Heat up a little water in a small pot, or large pot depending on the number of people you are feeding. I hope you can see the water level.

4. Pour in the softened oats and stir with a wooden spoon or stick

5. Keep stirring until the oats absorb the hot water in the pot

6. Keep stirring, you may need to add more water if needed i.e. the bottom of the pot is dry.

at this stage, the oats should start feeling elastic, with each turn of the spoon. Rubbery is probably not the word to use, but it will have some recoil to it, when you stir.

Once that starts to happen, you will also notice that the oats have darkened in colour a little

At this point, I added a teeny bit of water, just to get a softer texture, which is why you can see bits of it stuck to the sides of the pot. You decide if you want to add extra water or not.

Oatmeall made in its whole form has a roughish looking texture at first, but by the time you scoop it out of the pot, the rough bits will smooth out with the pressure of scooping.

Now, time to form The Tangerine Shape

Scoop out a tennis ball sized portion into a plastic bag – beware, it will be hot, hot, hot. You can protect your palm by wrapping with a napkin

bring the plastic wrap together, to properly form a ball

bunch it at the top

See….

Once knotted, begin to roll the ball in an anti-clockwise motion, until you see a twist form. As You do this, you will notice indentations beginning to form on the oatmeal

The tighter you roll, the deeper the indentation marks

and more pronounced. You will begin to see the oatmeal looking like a tangerine.

Once that happens, stop, unwrap the oatmeal and Ta daaaa….. You want to be artistic, you can dip a knife in water, tidy up any parts sticking out, and possibly carve in deeper lines. I did that with starch. Did not bother here. I was too hungry. Loool

this happens in seconds, a minute tops. Steam was still oozing out of the oatmeal by the time I was done. The extra effort made in presentation, even for home meals, just makes your friends and family feel extra special, besides you will be proud of your handiwork.

Now, to creating the bottom shape of a Tangerine. Same process, but not that much twisting involved, and is even faster.

As before, scoop out the oatmeal into a plastic wrap, mould it into a ball

this time, you only need to bunch it at the top tightly

You know how the bottom of a tangerine has like a circular sot in the middle and lines fan out from it. Yes, this is exactly what you want to re-create. If you bunch it too tight, some sides my bulge out, like the top tangerine shape, see the picture below. I had to stop that from happening quickly.

Ta daaaa………. See, the indentation marks from the plastic wrap is not as deep

Remember what I wrote above about the texture of the oatmeal smoothing out, once you scoop. See, it no longer roughs rough and scraggly

The post The Tangerine Oatmeal appeared first on Dooney's Kitchen.

Phew!!!!! I haven’t cooked Ogbono in the longest time. It is one of those soups that I must trust the source of the key ingredient before I cook it. Ogbono has disappointed me a few times because of bad batches that sometimes taste, smell and look awful. In some cases, it won’t even be elastic at all, so when I find a good batch that works, I buy tons and tons of it to keep. I have a particular woman my mother and I buy from in Lagos, at Oyingbo market. My mum brought some for me when she came last year and I had totally forgotten about it in that storage chest of freezers that I have.

Yesterday, someone sent me an email asking for a large pot of Ogbono to be delivered today. Never gotten an Ogbono order before. Quite strange, but not so strange in the sense that I know a lot of people who also don’t eat Ogbono unless they trust the source it is cooked in. Many a time you eat Ogbono in restaurants and it is one shade short of gross. The next time you are eating out, observe your fellow diners, and see out of the crowd if you will find any or maybe one or two ordering ogbono. If your counter-claim to this is due to its sticky nature and people avoiding stained clothes. Look around you, you will find okro and ewedu orders abound, but rarely ogbono. It is one for those things that I’m afraid, due to the nature of the restaurant business, ogbono is usually not cooked as it should be, so people tend to stay away from it. So, when I got the Ogbono order, I kinda smiled and said to myself, aaaaaaaw, this client trusts that I would prepare a mean pot of Ogbono, home cooked style, and prepare it I did. This is my Ogbono re-defined.

I have a friend Vivian, an Edo girl who doesn’t like Ogbono. Strange I know because the Edo’s throw it down when it gets to Ogbono, especially when cooked in a clay pot. I have told her, I humbly accept the challenge to convert her to Ogbono. In fact, when I cook it for her, I am going to break out the Clay Pot my other friend Omolabake sent to me from Lagos. Vivian, watch out. A steaming pot of delicious Ogbono rising out of a clay pot awaits you in the future. This people, is my Ogbono redefined. Finally, you can get to see how I cook it in pictures

You will need

Ground Ogbono - about 1 – 1 1/2 cups

Palm Oil

Dry Pepper - or tatashe (red bell pepper)

Ata rodo (scotch bonnet/habanero pepper) - the yellow variety

Assorted meats - i used goat meat, beef, saki and cow leg

Generous amounts of beef stock

Eja Osan - smoked catfish

Smoked red prawns

Smoked Mackerel

Eja Shawa

Iru

Ogiri Okpei

Crayfish

Palm Oil

Uziza leaves

Okro - sliced into rings

Kale – or spinach or ugu (the client requested for it this time)

Dooney’s Kitchen Tip:You may be wondering why you didn’t see Seasoning cubes or Salt on the list. This is because I didn’t use it. Go back to my first post on Ogbono (click HERE) and you will see that it is not on the list too. That is because I don’t use them when I cook Ogbono. If you think huh? Foodie scout honour. I don’t. Seasoning cubes have a way of messing with the taste of Ogbono, so I steer very very clear of it. I rely on my beef stock (which is the only point i use a little seasoning cubes, but leave the smoked fish to do the major work). When I boil meat for Ogbono I dunk a large portion of Smoked red prawns, Eja Osan and Eja Sawa in it. So much so that the stock itself taste so delicious, you would be drinking it with a spoon and it is that stock that forms the base of the Ogbono. Even when I add hot water to lighten up the Ogbono, the flavour is still there. My last secret weapon? Crayfish.

How To

1. Boil and season your meats with salt, a little seasoning cubes, lots and lots of Eja Osan (smoked fish), Eja Sawa and smoked red prawns. Bless you Omolabake for the huge stash of Eja Osan you sent from Lagos.

see the pieces of era sawa, smoked red prawns and the big black eja osan peeking out?

2. Once the meats have cooked, take the fish out of the pot, for use at a later stage

3. Now, you have your generous amount of beef stock, add dry pepper or blended tatashe. I use either for their rich red colour. Remember, I am using yellow ata rodo, so I need the redness from somewhere to compliment the palm oil.

4. Allow the pepper to dissolve for a bit, then add 1 or 2 wasp of Ogiri Okpei and Iru. The the image below, Ogiri okpei is the grey substance, Iru is the brown seed-like looking substance. You need to allow the ogiri dissolve into the stock completely and le the stock bubble up. You will know by the aroma and taste of the stock.

5. Add roughly ground crayfish (i rinse mine in water first, to get rid of sand)

add blended yellow pepper (yellow variety of scotch bonnet/habanero pepper)

6. Leave the stock to boil to allow all the flavours combine

7. Mix the Ogbono with about a cooking spoon + half of Palm oil and add to the pot. Dooney’s Kitchen Tip: Too much palm oil gives ogbono a shockingly dark colour which is gross. You want a pleasant shade of orange with a hint of brown. Too little palm oil gives a gross looking shade of light brown which I just cannot stand. Some people do though. Personal preference. My ogbono came in lumps due to moisture, if that happens to you, just use a spoon or your fingers to squash it to a rough powder.

8. In about a minute or two, the ogbono starts to bubble up in the pot.

just let it continue to do so on high heat.

It will thicken with time, dilute with hot water, till you get to the consistency that you like. Dooney’s Kitchen Tip: i will try to describe the consistency that you need in words. One of the times I wish I was shooting a video. Ogbono has a very high viscosity, its nature is to clump together. The longer it cooks, the less the viscosity but, you have to use hot water to help it along to get to that reduced viscosity that is pleasant to see and touch, otherwise, what you get a blob of soup that is gross. If it resists your spoon, you are not there yet. You should be able to slid the ogbono up with a ladle spoon in one swoop with not that much resistance. You should also be looking out for clumping like thick okro i.e. the ogbono should lift off in one swoop and almost look like you can see through it. Of course you wouldn’t but it should give off that appearance.

9. When you get the consistency that you want, add the vegetables. I started with chopped  Kale ( the client asked for it)

and chopped uziza. A minute after the uziza goes in, you will know you have a winner on your hands. Amazing, how much uziza leaves transform this dish.

10. Stir and leave to cook.

Dooney’s Kitchen Tip: Let it cook along nicely, you may need to dilute with hot water and season with ground crayfish, but let it cook. Ogbono needs to cook for at least, at least 45mins – 1hour overall. It is one of those the longer it cooks, the better it tastes, and that after effect left on your tongue taste that some don’t like about ogbono tends to be barely noticeable when you’ve cooked it for an extended period of time.

11. Finish off by returning the smoked fish variants back to the pot and stir gently

at this point, I also added Smoked Mackerel, which I did not boil with the meats. I would have added a little okro rings but the client doesn’t eat anything okro, so I left it out.

12. The very last thing you need to add here is crayfish. It just gives that extra boost of flavour, that will pack a punch from the very first bite.

……………and that’s your Ogbono re-defined.

Ogbono packed up to be delivered this afternoon. As for the fairy godmother effect? I am going to leave strict instructions with the client to only scoop out the portion to be eaten today, and the rest should be left undisturbed, to be reheated tomorrow with a little water. He will be told to give me a call tomorrow and tell me the difference. Heheheheheheh

This is how you want your Saturay afternoon Lunch to go, with a little Yellow Garri or Hot Amala on the side.

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You just may have read about the Tangerine Oatmeal. If you haven’t please click HERE. Today, I am bringing you Vegetable fortified Oatmeal, and not just Oatmeal, but Nigerian Starchy Solids under one big Umbrella. The beauty about this post is that it signifies the greatness that we can achieve when women come together as one. Gosh, our sex is famous for division amongst the ranks, pulling each other down, jealousy, fighting and all that embarrassing stuff that the men just stand by and let us do, just so that we can be distracted, while they continue ruling the world. I know in light of what is going on in Nigeria right now with those beautiful young girls whose futures have been stolen from them, this comes up as insignificant, but I want to use this post to at least try to pass on a message of when we focus on a goal instead of on each other, there is nothing we can’t do. The #bringbackourgirls campaign is gathering momentum because women are championing it. We have come together as one to demand those girls be brought back home. I feel quite helpless and disillusioned to be honest, but last night, even though this unison of females was about food, it was another lesson in what we can achieve when we come together. There will always be small mindedness amongst us, that will never change. Some women just take pleasure in tearing another woman’s success down, but we won’t let envy cause dissension within us. We will recognise the divisive elements within ourselves and render them useless. A good volition is ten times more powerful than a bad one. Remember that when next a fellow woman is up to her tricks. You are stronger than her, you just need to pull more good women to your side and watch her power snuff out. I have learnt that myself recently.

This post is dedicated to Remmy Tee and Temitope Arike Adedayo of Stunnababez Cuisine. Temitope came up with the idea of blending spinach and adding to oatmeal which is then stirred on the stove till it solidifies. Of course, giving the oatmeal a shocking green colour that is so unexpected. I looked at it and thought nice one, but nah, this gal aint blending nada. I made some green smoothies while I was deceiving myself during my now abandoned January Health Drive, that have traumatised me. Kale and Spinach to be precise, so when I saw hers, I shuddered and said Dunni no, that is not one to try. Before anyone tries to assuade me, trust me I tried adding banana, avocado, honey to the green smoothies, still YUCK!!!! I feel like washing my entire mouth and throat when I think about it. I knew no way in hell (pardon my French) would I be blending any veggie to add to oatmeal. Pigs would fly first. Then it occurred to me, I don’t need to blend the vegetable do I? Why not add it whole but in chopped bits. Ah ha. Idea sold. Now, I can attempt it. Saved by the whisker of my imagination. Looool. Try it I did and it was pretty with green and white flecks. This is where Remmy Tee comes in.

Remmy Tee looked at Temitope’s work and she was also thinking in another direction. She left a comment under my oatmeal post “I have been wondering how it can be incorporated into “eba”. I have had this image of rolled white and green eba in my head since I saw Temitópé Stunnababez Aríké Adedayo post.” Just as I tried my modification and posted it, she too was inspired to try hers and she posted it last night too. You should have seen the excitement beaming through her post from three of us. Really, it was leaping off the page and palpable. Temitope is going to try and work this in with Poundo flour, I am going to try to work it in with pounded yam made in a food processor. We have been bouncing ideas of each other, working in unison and Rita T. Adaba has joined in too saying she would try it with another coloured vegetable, Beetroot. How cool is that? Our mothers and grandmothers never gave us coloured starchy solids, we will be the generation that introduces it to our children.

I told them it would be a great idea to tie in all our ideas into one Blog post, giving life to the phenomenon (yes it is a phenomenon) on a platform outside of Facebook. Everyone who needs to see this would not necessarily be on Facebook and there is no point limiting this kind of information to just within a group. That is one of the advantages a public access blog can provide which a closed group on Facebook can’t. We need to learn to think bigger sometimes and not see the “glory” as belonging to one person, but all of us. I have christened us #crazygreensolidladies. Hehehehehe.

Here is Temitope’s initial idea which set the ball rolling

1. Blend spinach with your oatmeal, till you have a green oatmeal paste, place on the cooker to thicken

2. Leave it on the heat as you would with other starchy solids, till it thickens and solidifies.

Ta dah!!!!!!1

Serve with your choice of Nigerian Soup

how cute is that

Here is Remmy Tee’s idea. Blended the spinach with the amount of water that I know will make the portion of eba I need. Boiled the water and added the gari. Then I made regular eba and the rolling began. The rolling was challenging !!! One thing I noticed though, with the eba if it stays too long on the stove, the green color starts to go brown. So once you pour your gari don’t let it stay to long on heat to retain the nice green colour.

As I guessed, which I told her to do when she said she had problems rolling it. She came back and said Dunni, i did exactly that. Lol. She rolled the green eba separately, from the white eba. Placed the flat rolled white eba on top of the green eba and rolled together to form a sausage.

Green and White Eba.

It gets even more fun, introducing the pink Eba. This was posted by Angela O. Awunor. She aded beetroot powder to create this. We had quite the back and forth banter over the colour resembling raw meat, but I know this can be tweaked and tweaked into something really fun.

So, there you have it. Vegetable Fortified Nigerian Starchy Solids. I very much welcome more ideas from you guys. What vegetable would you be willing to experiment with to change the colour of our well known starchy solids. Would you be willing to try this to surprise your family? I sure hope so.

The post Vegetable Fortified Nigerian Starchy Solids appeared first on Dooney's Kitchen.

My last post was titled Vegetable Fortified Nigerian Solids (click HERE to see how) In that post I showed you examples of blending vegetables, which can then be added to our starchy solids, not just for the fun colour element, but introducing additional vegetables to your diet. I wanted to give this a different twist because my days of drinking raw veggie smoothies kind of turned me off adding pureed vegetables to anything.

So, this time, I decided to look at the problem from another angle. Instead of blending the vegetables, I would use it whole, but in chopped form. I am using chopped Kale. You can use chopped spinach or even ugu. Since The Tangerine Oatmeal post (click HERE) was about cooking oatmeal in its original form, I thought, I may as well show you the other side of cooking oatmeal i.e. milling it into a powder. If you are worried about losing the fibre that using oatmeal whole provides, well here comes adding chopped veggies (kale, spinach, collard greens etc) to save the day. Fibre sorted.

You will need

Your choice of chopped vegetables - spinach, kale, ugu, collard greens etc
Oatmeal - either powdered or whole
Hot water

How To

1. Grind the oatmeal into a fine powder using a dry mill

2. Heat up water in a kettle till it boils and blanch the vegetables. You can either pre blanch the vegetables to get rid of the raw vegetable taste, or you add the vegetables to the water from scratch. whichever you decide is fine.

3. Place enough water to cook the oatmeal powder in a pot and let it boil.

4. Pour in the oatmeal powder and start to stir immediately, just as you would with Amala

5. Once you start to turn in circular motions and the water has absorbed most if not all of the oatmeal powder, add the chopped vegetables

5. Keep turning and turning in circular motions, and you will notice the chopped vegetables spreading through the oatmeal

6. You may need to add a little water, if you feel the oatmeal is too stiff.

7. Keep turning till you get the consistency that you are comfortable with. The oatmeal is properly cooked when you notice it has turned slightly brown

Scoop out of the pot and serve

I was planning on shaping it into an Oatmeal Roll, then I remembered someone who used the natural crescent curve of the “igbako” to make indentations on her Eba on Facebook.

So, I moulded the oatmeal back together into a ball, being inspired by that image, but this time, I took it further making it my own, by going deeper than just an indentation but making it into well-defined ridges like Crescents. I can’t remember your name now, I have been hunting down for that picture for hours now. To you, I say thank you. If you can come out, I will like to reference you by mentioning your name.

So, lets call this Oatmeal Crescents shall we? Loool

Kale Fortified Oatmeal Crescents served with Mama Adeola Stew and Buka Ewedu

Recipe for Mama Adeola Stew, click HERE

Add the powdered oatmeal to the pan and keep stirring until it thickens. Stir very fast to prevent lumps
Joy Obiajulu

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