Nigerian Fried Rice and West African Peanut Chicken

When my brother Josh comes to visit, text conversations like this one ensue.

Me: How would you feel about us making Nigerian food some time this weekend? I'm thinking curry fried rice and peanut chicken kebabs. 

Josh: Big fat yes on that.

And so we did. Since there are two recipes in this post, I'll keep my comments brief with these few observations:

• I can't recall ever having curried fried rice. Or fried rice without soy sauce. I've been missing out.
• In this global eating adventure, the dishes I've made from African countries have consistently been among my favorites. See my posts on Madagascar and Tunisia.
• My house smelled incredible for hours after preparing this meal. We made it for a late lunch, and when we got back from house church at something like 9:00, a pungently spiced aroma greeted us when we came through the front door.
• Honestly, I can't recall the last time I bought bouillon cubes, since I normally use Penzeys's soup base. But the writer of these recipes urged me to trust Nigeria, so I did. And Nigeria did not let me down.
• If cooking both dishes as a meal, I recommend this sequence of prepping/cooking: 1) Cook the rice; prep the peanut mixture and rub it on the chicken. 2) Play a game of Pandemic while the rice cools and the chicken gets acquainted with its coating. 3) Prep the fried rice ingredients, fry the rice, and cook the chicken. If you're using a grill, then somewhere in there you'd need to prep your grill. 

Nigerian Curry Fried Rice

Adapted slightly from Global Table Adventure

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

1-1/2 cups long-grain white rice (uncooked)

2-3 Tbsp. oil (I used canola, and used more than 3 Tbsp.)

1 medium to large onion (yellow or white), small dice

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 Tbsp. curry powder

2 cubes chicken bouillon, crushed

1 bell pepper (yellow, orange, or red), small dice

8 oz. fresh green beans, small dice

1/2 cup corn kernels (canned, fresh, or frozen)

Salt, to taste

Directions

Measure rice into a fine mesh strainer and rinse well under cold water. Then cook according to package directions. Ideally, do this at least an hour ahead of time and, when the rice is finished cooking, remove the lid and fluff with a fork, then let it sit for a while to cool off and dry out a bit. If you made the rice the day before, all the better.

Now prep all your ingredients. We used corn kernels as a basic size guide for everything we chopped. I like to organize ingredients as I prep them. So the onions went on their own plate; the garlic, curry powder, and chicken bouillon went into a little condiment cup together; and the bell pepper, green beans, and corn shared another plate.

Heat 1 Tbsp. or so of oil in a large skillet or wok over medium-high heat.* Add the onion, and saute until softened and translucent. Add the garlic, curry powder, and bouillon and stir for just 30 seconds to a minute, then add the bell pepper, green beans, and corn. Continue cooking and stirring for a few minutes more, until the veggies are starting to soften, adding more oil as needed. Finally, incorporate the cooked rice, and keep on stir-frying until the rice is hot and a little browned, again adding more oil as needed. Taste and add salt if needed. Enjoy!

Note

*We used my 12-inch cast iron skillet, which I anticipated would not be big enough for the whole recipe. So we went with half the onions, half the seasonings, half the veggies, and half the rice, removed that to a serving bowl, then repeated the process with the other half of everything. And we started heating the chicken skillet about the time that the first half of the fried rice was done. 

West African Peanut Kebabs (Suya)

Adapted from Global Table Adventure

Yield: 4-6 servings

Ingredients

1-1/2 lbs. chicken or beef, sliced into strips*

1 cup roasted peanuts

1 Tbsp. grated fresh ginger

3 cloves garlic, minced

1 chicken bouillon cube, crumbled

2 tsp. paprika

1-1/2 tsp. onion powder

Cayenne pepper, to taste

Salt, to taste

Directions

Toast your peanuts in a dry skillet over low heat, just until they start to toast and smell amazing. Remove from heat (and from the hot skillet) and allow them to cool while you prep other ingredients. (You could skip this step. It was my addition because I love the extra flavor hit you get when toasting nuts.)

Blitz the peanuts in a food processor until they're crumbled/finely chopped, but be careful lest you end up with peanut butter. The ol' Magic Bullet did okay with this task, but not great. Combine the peanuts with the ginger, garlic, bouillon, paprika, onion powder, cayenne, and salt.

If you're feeling authentic, thread your strips of meat onto skewers, then press the peanut mixture onto the meat. If you're feeling lazy, dump the meat into a gallon zip bag along with the peanut mixture, and give it a nice massage so the meat is coated nicely. Either way, refrigerate the seasoned meat for at least 30 minutes.

Cook over medium heat--in a skillet or on a grill--until done, being careful not to move them around too much, as the coating will fall off pretty easily.

Note

*We used boneless, skinless chicken thighs; apparently you could also use ram.

Global Eats: A Year in Review

Photo credit: “World Map – Abstract Acrylic.” Photo by Nicolas Raymond. Painting by Lara Mukahirn. Some rights reserved. Retrieved here.

About a year ago, I challenged myself to spend 2017 exploring more cultures through food. It's been a fun and scrumptious year! I've enjoyed the challenge of seeking out new recipes, techniques, ingredients, and flavor combinations from all over the world. Also, aiming for one country each month was just about perfect--it was doable and consistent.

And because bloggers are supposed to do end-of-year round-ups, here's a rundown of the foods I've gotten to experience this year, as well as some new ingredients and equipment that have found new homes in my kitchen.

Looking ahead to 2018, I plan to keep experimenting with different international cuisines! Near the top of my list: Bangladesh and Poland.

January: Peru

Menu and write-up are here
Peruvian Beef Kebabs (Anticuchos with Roasted Yellow Pepper Sauce)
Potatoes with Huancaina Sauce (Papa a la Huancaina)
Sarsa Salad
Crema Volteada

February: Tunisia

Menu and write-up are here
Chicken Kebabs with Currant and Olive Relish
Slata Mechouia (Grilled Salad)
Orange Almond Cake

March: Hungary (and kinda Romania)

Hungarian Tomato-Pepper Stew (Lesco) - and we served it over polenta, because apparently polenta is a common breakfast element in Romania.

April: Vietnam

Vietnamese Shrimp Noodle Bowl (Bun Tom Xao) - fresh, crunchy, and bursting with flavor.

May: Finland and Dutch West Indies

Finnish Pulla Bread with Apricots and Pistachios - one of the most beautiful things I've ever made. I was so proud of these glisteningly bronzed braids!
Dutch West Indian Chicken Kebabs (Boka Dushi) with Dutch West Indian Peanut Sauce - with most dishes, I have a pretty good idea of how they're going to taste. This one, however, combined so many ingredients that I wouldn't have thought to combine, that I truly didn't know what to expect from the finished dish. Happily, it turned out to be one of my favorite dishes this year. We served it with a side of sauteed plantains.

June

My job is crazy-busy every June, so I didn't officially try any new countries. But the Tunisian menu got an encore performance, and I vaguely remember trying a new Thai dish.

July: Madagascar and Ethiopia

Malagasy Chicken with Ginger (Akoho Sy Sakamalao) - another favorite this year, largely because it surprised me with how good the finished dish was despite the fairly simple ingredients and preparation technique.
Ethiopian Cucumber-Mango Salad

August

For the life of me, I can't remember what country (if any) I cooked in August. But I did try preserved lemons for the first time, and those are used a lot in north African and Mediterranean dishes.

September: Myanmar

Burmese Ginger Salad (Gin Thoke) - this salad had so much going on. It was strong on the ginger and lemon, crunchy from the cabbage, and filling thanks to the chickpeas and lentils.
Also some Pineappleade which is kinda generically Southeast Asian.
Also an encore of the Malagasy chicken.

October: Somalia

Somali Beef Stew with Spiced Rice (Bariis Maraq) - making this meal included mixing up a classic Somali spice blend, called xawaash, which was a key player in both the stew and the spiced rice. If you make this, do yourself a favor and don't skip the bananas. They seemed to me like an odd topping, but my favorite bites were ones that included banana. As a fun side note, this dish was part of a global food spread that my house church did in celebration of World Food Day.

November: Germany

Obatzter (Camembert cheese spread)
Bavarian Soft Pretzels

December: Spain

Rustic Spanish Bread (Pan Rustico) - simple and good. In light of the holidays, birthday, and being knocked out with a cold for a few days, something simple was all I could manage this month.

New Ingredients and Equipment

• Aji amarillo - yellow pepper paste from Peru
• Almond meal - sure, it's widely used here in the States, but Tunisia inspired me to use it for the first time
• Hungarian wax peppers - mild spice level, and they were readily available at Walmart
• Kitchen scale - this inexpensive but reliable scale is suuuuuper helpful with recipes with measurements written in grams and ounces rather than cups and teaspoons ... which happens often when using recipes that didn't originate in the U.S.
• Orange blossom water - basically the elixer of the gods
• Pistachios - though I never cared for them before, I used (and enjoyed!) them quite a bit this year
• Pomegranate molasses - made my own; used in this Pomegranate Molasses Chicken
• Preserved lemons - when my current jar runs out, I want to try making my own
• Spice grinder - this year my eyes (and taste buds) were opened to the wonderful world of grinding one's own spices right before tossing them into a dish. Grinding whole cloves, peppercorns, and cumin seeds will give you much more punch than measuring out pre-ground spices. I use my Magic Bullet which I've had for awhile, and I've heard that a coffee grinder or a mortar and pestle work quite well.
• Sumac - ground spice used a lot in Middle Eastern foods; bought at Cordell's; I'd eaten it before but hadn't cooked with it
• Xawaash - Somalian spice blend featuring cinnamon, coriander, cumin, black pepper, cardamom, cloves, and turmeric; recipe is included in the Somali stew recipe above.

Ethiopian Cucumber-Mango Salad

In my last post you may recall that I had a little soapbox moment about lumping all African countries together instead of recognizing them as very distinct countries and cultures.

Well, apparently I have now accidentally lumped two African countries and cuisines into a single menu, despite my best intentions. As it turns out, the ambiguous "East African" salad that wouldn't commit to a specific country but inspired me to cook up some Malagasy food, is actually Ethiopian. While typing up the recipe, I did a quick search to see if Cooking Light had an online version of the Cucumber-Mango Salad recipe. They do. And the online version very clearly identifies it as Ethiopian. So there you go.

Ethiopia and Madagascar, I acknowledge your distinctness, honor you as two different countries, and appreciate your foods.

Ethiopia's Cucumber-Mango Salad was a win. The longer ingredient list made for all sorts of flavors and textures pinging around in my mouth. The cinnamon, cumin, and clove hint at Indian curry flavors, while the tomato, mango, and cilantro are reminiscent of Latin salsa. The cucumber and red onion add crunch, and the lime juice wakes everything up and ties it all together. Mine turned out a little mushier than the cookbook photo suggested, but the taste was stellar. If you're mush-averse, I'd suggest using firm tomatoes or leaving them raw.


Ethiopian Cucumber-Mango Salad
From Cooking Light's Global Kitchen cookbook
Yield: 6 servings

Ingredients
1 cucumber, thinly sliced (about 2 cups)
1-1/2 cups finely chopped red onion
1/2 tsp. salt

A drizzle of peanut oil (I used canola)
1 lb. tomato, chopped and seeded (ideally drained, too)
3 Tbsp. chopped peanuts (dry-roasted, preferably unsalted)
1-2 jalapenos, seeded and finely chopped*
1/4 tsp. ground coriander
1/4 tsp. ground cumin
Pinch of cayenne
Dash of ground cinnamon
Dash of ground cloves

1 garlic clove, minced
1-2 mangoes, peeled and diced (about 1-3/4 cups)
1 Tbsp. chopped fresh cilantro
1 lime, juiced

Directions
Toss the cucumber and red onion with the salt, and set in a colander to drain for at least 20 minutes.**

Heat a medium to large skillet over medium-high heat. Add the oil, followed by the tomatoes, peanuts, jalapenos, coriander, cumin, cayenne, cinnamon, and cloves. Saute for just a few minutes, until the tomato is tender and warmed through (about 5 minutes tops). Remove from heat and allow to cool to room temperature.

In a medium to large bowl gently toss together the cucumber mixture, tomato mixture, garlic, mango, cilantro, and lime juice.

Notes
*If you can find red jalapenos, then do one red and one green. I used just one jalapeno, and the salad was very mild. Could have easily tossed in another and been totally fine.
**The recipe said to include the garlic at this stage, but I was afraid it would just fall through the holes in my colander. So I set it aside in a separate tiny dish with a sprinkle of salt.

Malagasy Chicken with Ginger (Akoho sy Sakamalao)

Note to self: onions that are simmered in a luscious amount of coconut oil until they're so soft they melt in your mouth ... are not photogenic. More important note to self: they're terrific for eating.

While flipping through reading like a novel the Global Kitchen cookbook, an East African Cucumber-Mango Salad recipe caught my eye but also presented a dilemma. You see, it reeeeally bothers me when people treat the entire African continent as a single country, culture, or people group. It's just wrong. So I was miffed that the recipe was associated with the broader region of East Africa rather than a specific country ... to the point that I almost wrote off the recipe on principle. But it sounded so yummy and summery! So I struck a compromise with myself: I'd find a main dish recipe from a specific country in East Africa, and make this ambiguous Cucumber-Mango Salad as a side dish.

The winner of that internet search was Akoho sy Sakamalao--literally "chicken and ginger"--a dish hailing from Madagascar. To be honest, the recipe sounded good but not amazing. The ingredient list is simple, the cooking technique un-fussy. But my first bite revealed the dish to be far greater than the sum of its parts. There's some kind of magic happening with the ginger-lemon-garlic rub, the caramelizing onions and bell peppers, the nutty coconut oil, and the bed of simple rice soaking up all those flavors.

All in all, a wonderful meal! The Akoho sy Sakamalao recipe is below, and the Cucumber-Mango Salad recipe is here. Thanks, Madagascar!


Malagasy Chicken with Ginger (Akoho sy Sakamalao)
Adapted from Global Table Adventure
Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients
3 cloves garlic, minced
1-inch piece of fresh ginger, grated
Zest from 1 lemon
4 chicken thighs (I used boneless, skinless, without the drumsticks attached)*
1/3 cup coconut oil**
1 orange bell pepper, sliced
1 onion, sliced
Salt and pepper, to taste
Cooked white rice, for serving

Directions
Combine the garlic, ginger, and lemon zest, and rub it all over the chicken. Cover (or put into a plastic zip bag) and refrigerate for at least 2 hours. Overnight or all day would be perfectly fine.

In a large skillet, heat the coconut oil over medium heat. Brown the chicken until it's a lovely golden color on both sides. When you add the chicken to the pan, your oil will probably go crazy. I recommend putting a lid on the skillet, but tilt it to let steam out, and pull the skillet off the burner to let the oil calm down a bit any time you need to mess with the food inside.

When the chicken is beautiful, take it out of the pan, and season it with salt and pepper. Add the bell pepper and onion to the pan, and saute until softened. Add the chicken back to the pan, lower the heat, and put a lid on (not tilted this time). Let it simmer for about 45 minutes, until the chicken is super tender. I gave the skillet a good shake/slide/jiggle every so often to keep things from sticking.

Cook your rice while the chicken and veggies are simmering.

Nibble a bit and add more salt and pepper if needed. To serve, spoon a good portion of rice onto your plate. Top with onion/bell pepper mixture and a chicken thigh. Scoop some of the sauce over the whole thing--the sugar from the onions and lemon will have caramelized nicely, and all that glorious flavor will be packed into your coconut oil sauce.

Notes
*The recipe on Global Table Adventure uses bone-in thigh quarters (leg and thigh both). I decided to go for just thighs in order to have smaller portions and less meat, and at the store I went into auto-pilot and got boneless skinless, though bone-in probably would have been more flavorful.

**I couldn't quite bring myself to eat an entire 1/3 cup of coconut oil by myself, so I ended up scooping it only sparingly over my plate ... which meant that a lot of that glorious caramelized flavor was wasted. If I make this again, I'd probably scale back to 3-4 Tbsp. coconut oil instead of a full 1/3 cup.

Flavor Trip to Tunisia

Years ago, when a Food Network Star contestant was asked to tell viewers what harissa is, he responded, "It's the devil's toothpaste!" From that first moment of learning of this spicy chili paste's existence, I was afraid of it. But I kept seeing it pop up in magazines and food blogs, and while the fear lingered, I also always felt drawn to it, because its name and my name are almost the same.

Well, after exploring Peru's cuisine in January, I wanted to hop over to a country in Africa next ... and since harissa hails from Tunisia, I decided it was time to conquer my fear of the stuff. I looked at prepared harissa paste on Amazon, and even found this excellent article on The Kitchn about how to make your own harissa paste, using different kinds of chilies for sweeter, smokier, or spicier flavor profiles. And suddenly, I could find very few Tunisian recipes using harissa paste, and even fewer (none?) that used enough to warrant making a whole batch of harissa paste myself.

So harissa got pushed to the back burner once again, but the Tunisian idea stuck. Here's what I made a few weeks ago:

• Tunisian Chicken Kebabs with Currant and Olive Relish - This dish packs some serious flavor, bringing together sweet currants, briny olives, mild peppadew peppers, and smoky roasted red bell pepper. Since peppadew peppers were nowhere to be found in the grocery stores I searched, I substituted sweet cherry peppers with excellent results. And I cooked the chicken in a cast iron skillet on the stove. I was a bit concerned that the relish and marinade would be too puckery and briny, but it turned out very nicely balanced with the sweetness of the currants and the earthiness of the roasted red bell pepper.
• Slata Mechouia (Tunisian Grilled Salad) - Versions of this dish showed up a lot in my online searching for Tunisian recipes, which leads me to believe it's pretty authentically Tunisian. You grill/roast/char a bunch of veggies, chop everything up nice and fine, throw in some spices and olive oil, and top with olives and hard-boiled eggs. Most recipes also recommended topping it with canned tuna, but I left that off. It's kind of like a thick, chunky, not-real-soupy-at-all salsa. I thoroughly enjoyed it and would definitely recommend that you give it a try. I could see potential for spooning this salad over eggs or serving it with hummus and pita.
• Tunisian Orange Almond Cake - Okay, I don't generally like cake all that much, but this cake was stellar! The batter is nutty, sweet, rich, and laced with orange and lemon zest. And if that wasn't tasty enough, it's drenched in a syrup made from sugar, cinnamon, clove, star anise, more orange and lemon, and orange blossom water. Although the orange blossom water makes the cake feel a bit magical, you could leave it out and would still have a scrumptious dessert. You can even underbake your cake and have it completely fall apart on you so you're quite literally left with an ugly pile of cake pieces, and it will still be superb. (Not that I know that from personal experience.) The recipe calls for caster sugar, which I made myself by taking granulated sugar for a spin in my food processor. You want it to be finer than granulated sugar but coarser than powdered sugar. Also, the recipe is all metric and weight measurements, which inspired me to finally give in and buy a kitchen scale. I got this little guy for $12, and he did great!

Lamb, Apricot, and Olive Tagine

Back in September I bought some ground lamb on a bit of a whim, then couldn't settle on a recipe special enough to use said lamb (it's not cheap, you know). So into the freezer it went, and there it stayed until last week when I discovered this Slow-Cooker Lamb, Apricot, and Olive Tagine recipe from Real Simple. I'd never heard of tagine, it sounded like a really interesting combination of flavors, and I thought that using a slow cooker might be good in case the lamb was freezer burned.

Not the most photogenic dish, but very tasty!

To my surprise, the meat was not freezer burned (points for HEB packaging!). And the flavors were, in fact, interesting and incredible! I also just Googled "tagine" (also "tajine"), and it's a Moroccan dish named after the unique pot it's traditionally cooked in. There's also Tunisian tagine, but it's very different and resembles a frittata. Who knew?

I followed the recipe almost exactly, though I used ground lamb rather than 1-inch pieces. I also decreased the olives a tad since green olives aren't my favorite. And I left out the pistachios.

The original recipe says it serves 4, but you can easily do smaller portions and get more servings out of this. In fact, it's pretty rich, so I've been eating portions that are probably about half the size that Real Simple intends.  Smaller portions also helps make it more nutritious since this is not the lowest-calorie dish out there.

Slow-Cooker Lamb, Apricot, and Olive Tagine
Copied word-for-word from Real Simple

1 1/2 pounds lamb shoulder, trimmed and cut into 1-inch pieces
4 carrots, cut into 1-inch pieces
1 medium onion, chopped
1/2 cup dried apricots, halved
1/2 cup pitted green olives
2 cloves garlic, chopped
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon paprika
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
kosher salt and black pepper
1 cup couscous
chopped pistachios, fresh cilantro leaves, and lemon wedges, for serving


In a 4- to 6-quart slow cooker, mix together the lamb, carrots, onion, apricots, olives, garlic, flour, paprika, cumin, cinnamon, ginger, 1 teaspoon salt, ¼ teaspoon pepper, and ½ cup water.

Cover and cook until the lamb and vegetables are tender, on low for 7 to 8 hours or on high for 4 to 5 hours (this will shorten total recipe time).

Ten minutes before serving, cook the couscous according to the package directions. Serve the lamb on the couscous with the pistachios, cilantro, and lemon wedges.