No Passport Required: A Culinary Trip to Africa

As anyone who has eaten with us knows, our meals tend to take a long time to cook. We like to watch cooking shows like Chopped and Top Chef, hoping to be inspired and create our new favorite dish. We're often in the kitchen for three or more hours letting flavors develop slow and low. That is a technique that seems to work in any food preparation: super low heat and just let it cook for hours. You'll get amazing flavor that just doesn't happen in a 30 minute meal. Documenting our cooking should be a bit of a challenge since we tend to toss in a pinch or this here and a pinch of that there and are almost never able to recreate the dish. Here we go anyways.

The theme for tonight's meal? Africa. Some parts of this meal are old hat to us, specifically the Injera and Doro Wat. Others, the African Peanut Stew, are new creations that we borrow from a recipe and put our own spin on it that is often far healthier than the original recipe.

Injera

Teff Flour

Wheat Flour

Yeast

Salt

Unlike many other recipes will tell you, injera can be made in a few hours, as opposed to the traditional process that can take several days. All you need is a heating lamp of some type and it will speed up the process. Injera is basically a sourdough crepe and goes amazingly with the next two dishes.

Start with 1.5 cups of teff flour and 1/2 cup of wheat flour. Add one packet for rapid rise yeast. Slowly add warm water, all while stirring with your hand until you get a crumbly texture. Then add more (small amounts at a time) until you end up with a thick, gelatinous texture. You'll need to stir this mixture until it is a in homogeneous mixture. Continue adding small amounts of water until you can pull your hand out and the mixture will run off your hand. This is really a trial and error recipe that takes some time to get right. We've been doing it for a year and it doesn't always come out perfect. You will want to let this sit under a hot lamp for 2 hours. So if you want to eat earlier than we do, start that early. If you're really on top of this you could start it the night before and let it stand for almost a day.

Once the mixture has stood for a few hours (or days), get a large shallow pan out and turn the heat up high (and I mean high). Using a sea salt grinder, add salt to the hot pan. Next spoon about a cup of the mixture into the pan so it covers most of the bottom. Then lift the pan off the heat and rotate the pan so that the mixture covers the entire bottom. Place on high heat. The mixture should bubble like a pancake. This process takes about 2 minutes. However, you cannot take your eyes off of the pan, it goes from done to too done pretty quickly. Using a plastic spatula, try and lift the injera out of the pan. Once it is properly cooked it should come out relatively easily with the spatula. 

Doro Wat Recipe

Onion

Garlic

Crushed Fenugreek Seeds

Paprika

Cardamom

Salt

Pepper

Red Wine

Chicken Stock

Chicken Breast

Lemon Juice

Egg

Using a food processor, dice up an onion and garlic. You want this somewhere in between a puree and big chunks. Put it in a pan and let cook until almost soft and tender, but not caramelized. Add Red Wine, Chicken Stock, Fenugreek, Paprika, Salt and Pepper. Reduce to medium-low heat, and simmer uncovered stirring occasionally until liquid reduces in volume by about 1/3. 

Meanwhile, chop chicken breast into small pieces, sized at about 1" cubes. Put chicken in a mixing bowl, pour in lemon juice and add salt, and push chicken around until thoroughly coated, preferably a small enough bowl to submerged in the juice. The acid in the lemon juice tenderizes the meat and leaves it very juicy.  

When the mixture has reduced, add the chicken, reduce the heat and cover. Let simmer at low heat for another 1/2 an hour on low. 

Hard boil the egg, put in cold water on high, wait until its boiling, then turn heat off. Wait 15 mins then drain water, run egg under cold water. Peel shell off of egg. 

Serve Chicken mix with the hard-boiled egg served on a piece of the Injera!

African Peanut Stew

Onion

Ginger

Garlic

Chopped Tomatoes (Pomi Chopped Tomatoes are my favorite)

Vegetable Stock

Basmati Brown Rice

Extra Chunky Peanut Butter

Paneer (this is an Indian cheese you can buy online if there isn't an Indian market close by)

Sweet Peas

Corn

Carrots

Using a food processor, chop the onions and garlic into small chunks. Put on a high heat and sautee until soft. Then add minced ginger root and chopped tomatoes to the mixture. Add 5-6 cups of vegetable stock (you can use chicken stock if you aren't cooking for any vegetarians like myself). At this point you want a very soupy consistency, since we'll be cooking rice with this mixture. Add Salt and Pepper to this, mixture and bring to near a boil. When it starts bubbling, turn it down and let simmer for about 1/2 an hour.

Add 3/4 cup of the brown basmati rice to the mixture, cover and let simmer at about 40% of the max heat for about twenty minutes, or until the rice is tender. 

Next you the peanut butter to the pot. Stir it into the soup base until it has been evenly distributed into the mix. Add sweet peas and corn (frozen is fine) to the mixture and stir. Now shred a carrot and add it to the mixture. Stir in and let simmer on low. Cut Paneer into small cubes and add to the mixture, stirring it in. Let simmer on low (1-2 max on your stove) for about 15 minutes or until the cubes of paneer are tender. 

Basic Rules That Define Our Meals

So a little background into our cooking style, preferences and standard practices before we delve into our first dinner post. For starters, I am a vegetarian. That tends to pose some problems for your less adventurous or creative cooks as many have no idea what to cook for a vegetarian. For years it felt like my only meal options at restaurants were sides. As fun as it is to have a meal composed entirely of sides, unless it is a tapas restaurant the food tends to be pretty basic and unexciting. On the other side of things, my cooking sidekick and chef extraordinaire (not professionally) boyfriend eats fish and poultry, but no red meat. Self-imposed dietary restrictions aside, we also like to infuse flavor through flavorful and fresh ingredients instead of fat, which few if any restaurants (and likely people) do. 

Here are a few of our tricks we use on a nightly basis to creating healthy but amazingly flavorful and tasty meals:

1. Anytime a recipe calls for cream or sour cream, we substitute in plain strained fat-free Greek yogurt. It is an amazing ingredient that seems to make its way into almost all of our meals by adding creaminess and thickness without adding lots of fat. Our go to: Fage 0% Greek Yogurt

2. Anytime a recipe calls for butter, we substitute extra virgin olive oil. It's full of healthy fats that are far and away better for you than any amount of butter. 

3. If a recipe calls for salt, we substitute Herbamare. It is a sea salt based spice that also contains herbs and is way less salty than salt, but adds a great flavor when a bit of saltiness is necessary. 

4. The base to a great many of our dishes consists of onions, garlic and ginger root. It's hard to go wrong with that kind of base and the flavors work with just about ever flavor profile we're going for. 

5. Always go with the freshest option available. When we get cheese, we always buy it from the deli. Fresh mozzarella is so much better than pre-shredded packaged mozzarella. Takes a bit longer to prepare, but believe me it is worth it. The same goes with herbs. We buy fresh cilantro, basil and chives every few days. 

6. As a general rule of thumb, we love to use herbs and spices in every dish. Always going for a super flavorful meal is standard for us. If you don't believe me, check out the "spice rack." Two full cupboards filled to the brim with spices. We've also got a small drawer or extra spices that wouldn't fit.