Home Cooking - Liberian Style

Last night while dipping into my bowl of dinner (brown rice with streamed okra and eggplant with a dash of palm oil), the smell and taste of palm oil did what it always does...instantly transported me back to all things Liberia. Therefore the timing of this brilliant New York Times article by Liberian writer Helene Cooper about her culinary journey through Monrovia was sent direct from the heavens just for my reading (and salivating) pleasure! The article was written just as any good article about food should be and here are a few snippets to warm you up:

"I closed my eyes as the first spoonful of fufu, dripping in bitterleaf, entered my mouth. Eunice had used at least four or five Scotch bonnet peppers, and I quickly started to sweat. But holy crow, was it good. For 20 minutes I ate, completely tuning out my sister and mother as I drowned myself in the familiar taste of home, my eyes watering, nose running, and mouth on fire. It was going to be a great week."

Food writing is so exciting, especially when it's about food you know oh so well! Check out the rest of this great piece right here.

{Photos and Quote: New York Times}

Lunch Time

Yuuummm food! It's almost lunchtime and this image of Ethiopian injera and with chicken stew is making me hungry! I haven't had Ethiopian food in forever!

{Photo: Glen Proebstel via khm}

64 sq ft Kitchen

I can never get enough of a good story, one that transports you to a place you have never been before or makes you recall an experience in a whole new way. There are many ways to tell a story, through books, plays, poems and music but I especially love it when people tell stories through other mediums.

One exciting medium is through food! I love it when people share their personal stories through food. I recently came across a blog called 64 Sq Ft Kitchen by an Algerian woman called Warda. Honestly, her entries literally draw you into a whole new culinary world.


One of the exciting things about exploring a new culture is always the food. While nothing compares to the real deal (i.e. food actually in your mouth), Warda transports you to her kitchen and that of her mother and grandmother to bring you recipes from her homeland that just make your mouth water. For example this recipe by her grandmother for Yogurt Cake with oranges and dates which are abundant in Algeria literally swipes you away with the memory and how making this meal is a tiny connection she maintains with someone she clearly cares for. Her other entries in which she writes about Algerian food are just so touching and mouth watering!


Anywhere - I hope these pictures entice you to head over and see what I'm talking about. I wanted to test one of these recipes out for you all but I'm still hunting for some of these ingredients (my local farmer's market doesn't carry harissa for some silly reason) and let you know how something works out!


{All pics from 64 Sq Ft Kitchen}

The New Frontier: African Cuisine

Last summer in an excellent article about African cuisine, a New York Times article ended in the following by restaurateur Merkato saying this: "We know regional Italian food and regional French food. But a billion people’s experience is just a blur."

In bring this up because yesterday, the Senegalese chef Pierre Thiam was featured on one of my favorite shows: Splendid Table. This is a show for "people who love to eat" which, being one of said people, I tune into faithfully every week. The host, Lynne Kasper, echoed Mr. Merkato in saying little is known about the large variety of African cuisine. Mr. Thiam is trying to change that with his new cookbook Yolele! Recipes From the Heart of Senegal. According to the LA Times, the book has "recipes for popular African street food, hearty traditional stews, and dishes showcasing the country's Portuguese and Vietnamese influences, as well as the significant imprint of French colonialism." I definitely want to try out these recipes.

For those of you living in NYC, you can check out Thiam's restaurant in Brooklyn called Le Grand Dakar. Those of us in DC will have to suffice with Bukem Cafe in Adam's Morgan for delicious West African cuisine.

Anyone have recommendations on good African restaurants or African influenced food in your city?

B the Locavore?

Locavore is a word that Americans have come up with to describe something as natural as breathing to our forefathers and still normal to the majority of the world's population: eating food locally made, grown, and/or processed. To even attempt to have consciousness about where your food comes from is treated like an exotic (or primitive depending on the interpreter), activity. The loss of such knowledge in 'third world countries' (hate that phrase), is yet another sign that they are making key advancements.

These changes, the gaining or loosing of consciousness about food, seems to happen very slowly and before you know it, you have don't know where your apple has come from unless you read it on a sticker attached. A few days without a leafy salad with all the sidekicks or even the mere access to such food (even if you don't buy it) sends your body going into some unnatural state of shock. It's a total breakdown in connection between what we put in our mouths and our knowledge about where it comes from.

This was me until very recently. When I lived in Liberia as a child, of course I was a locavore, there really wasn't too much of an option. However there was still a serious disconnect as I rarely ever went to the market and even though my grandmother owned a farm, I can't remember ever making the journey beyond her home to her farm. In fact, I don't even know if she grew anything other than rubber trees and of course the guava tree at her house. When I moved to the U.S. it was made very clear that food comes from a supermarket and you need know nothing beyond this simple fact. Apple picking trips were a brief reminder that fruits come from trees and watching my uncle tend to his small garden showed that cultivating food is literally a very difficult labor of love.

It has only been recently, mostly due to my time in Sudan working with farmers and butchers, that I have started to think more carefully about where my food comes from. While some friends and family think that I've lost my mind when I tell them about my current food shopping habits which include going to famer's markets on freezing days like yesterday, trips to Whole Foods, and also trips to the local grocery store all in the same week, I can honestly say that I have barely begun to scratched the surface. I get so excited about this and each trip to the market gets me more excited. I have no problem talking food to people I don't even know. Friday night at the company Christmas party, I found myself telling people about the various farmer's markets, which one is open in the winter, even which ones take food coupons (yes, the U.S. Government even encourages poor people to buy local) and all the food related places that I still have to explore come spring. I find myself looking twice at blood red tomatoes in December because I now know that they are either coming for far, far away or are going to be really pricey because someone is paying a lot of money in energy bills for a greenhouse.

I really noticed my change last week when in a moment of 'i need fruit other than the apple' I have bought 2 grapefruits all the way from Texas. For the first two days (I cut into halves and carry to work for breakfast), while I enjoyed the fruit, I was super conscious with every bite that what I was enjoying was a priviledge and that's how I decided to treat the event. With the second grapefruit, I was shocked back into reality with it's bitter taste and instantly knew that the foodie powers that be were telling me that clearly this was not what I was suppose to be eating - after all, food is suppose to taste good.

Anyway, as I have said, this is all pretty new to me, but it makes me very excited and everyday I just want to learn more and more. So, do you know where your food comes from? Do you even care? Do you care, but the cost of eating local and organic is too much of a hurdle, or too much effort (i.e. going to more than one place to get food)? I'd love to hear your food experiences in whichever country, county, state, province, city or village you are living in!

This has been a very long introduction to the week, but this is something I've been thinking about since last week and I'm glad I finally got the chance to share with you. With a little planning, I have also lined up an entire week of exciting posts so you can know that there will be something new everyday right here!

Rice Bread

As the holiday season quickly approaches, I cannot help fantasizing about my two absolutely favorite Liberia foods: jollof rice and rice bread. It is not mere coincidence that both of these dishes involve rice as this is one food item that I cannot imagine living happily without. From Sundays at my grandmother's house in Careysburg, Christmas gatherings on the beach in Buchanan all the way to Thanksgiving dinners in the U.S. right next to the turkey, these two dishes are a staple in my family. While I've made the leap to eating brown rice for hip-and-thigh-reduction reasons whenever I cook in my apartment, the holiday season and family gatherings allow me the perfect excuse to indulge. Just to give you a rough idea, I can safely say I counted at least 13 trays of rice bread at the recent funeral - Liberians love this stuff!

Jollof rice is most easily compared to Spanish rice and maybe even a paella in terms of the length of preparation time. I am 100% bias to my mother's jollof rice and recently my sister has stepped up to bring on the challenge. This dish is prepared with just about the entire kitchen: chicken, smoked ham, mixed veggies, a lot of seasoning including the almighty Season-All and maggie cubes upon cubes. While this is a dish that just about every Liberian makes for any real gathering, not everyone knows how to do this right, especially when they get into putting so much hot pepper that all other flavor in the dish becomes lost to your numbed senses.

The other staple, rice bread, should really have songs and poetry written in it's honor and I'm not even kidding. This is especially true when it was made by my aunt who just passed away. Hers was above and beyond my very favorite and when she died, one of my major concerns was making sure that the recipe did not go to the grave with her as has happened with my grandmother amazing rolls. While we were all grieving, in the back of my mind, I kept wondering when was the appropriate time to pop the 'who has the recipe' question to her children. So you can all imagine my absolute relief when one of her daughters confirmed that she had it and that her mother's rice bread would live on!

In addition to being made with rice, in the 'cream of rice' form, this dish has the other key ingredient of any tropical nation: banana. Whether for the forests of Liberia or those of Central America or Asia, some good, so-riped-it's-almost-to-the-point-of-being-overiped bananas really add the bang to this bread. Some like to get all creative with it and add in ginger or other things that really don't belong, but my aunt always kept it sweet and simple. Whenever she knew that I was going to be around, she would whip me up a tray. Yup, an entire tray of rice bread just for me! From mouth direct to hips, there was no restraint in me until the very last crumb was gone and my stomach was about to explode.

Anyway, what are some of your favorite, bring-you-to-your-knees dishes?

What's for dinner?

In case I haven't mentioned it, I LOVE good food and while I don't consider myself the best chef, I like cooking. This week has already seen my trying out two new recipes. The first was a Succotash recipe that I got at the farmer's market on Saturday and whipped together on Sunday and today's was Grilled Eggplant Stacks courtesy of Epicurious. The taste is AMAZING, but dare I say my presentation is pretty close to the mark?!?!?!?

Got Milk?

As I've mentioned, I've been reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle which is having a serious impact on me and how I think about food, and more specifically, where food comes from. Since starting on the book, I've double thought everything that has gone into my system.

This extra thinking about food, made this snippet of KJ's experience in Nigeria resonate even more. She writes:

'You'd think the supposedly most populated country in Africa (roughly 146 million) would have a booming milk production, but nooooooooooooo. Market forces prevailed in the 70s so that it was cheaper to get milk powder from donor countries (now the EU) rather than to produce fresh milk from Nigeria - there hasn't been fresh milk production for the grand population here since. This is really annoying to me, considering the amount of cows walking around, along with the nutritional value of fresh milk instead of powdered, and the ability to make better cheese using fresh milk over my hot plate when I'm desperate (a little bit of vinegar or lime with a dash of salt in boiling milk and I'm usually set). Coming from Kenya where milky, sugary tea is king in nearly every household, I can't tell you how disappointed I am (there is no warm, fuzzy feeling when one put spoonfuls of powdered milk in one's tea). I visited a local dairy farm last week and even THEY don't sell fresh milk, since it's too expensive to store and ship (stable electricity and bad roads being a huge problem in Nigeria). I did manage to finagle the dairy manager into selling me ten liters of milk from his personal cows, but the milk soured the next day. I don't actually like milk on its own and usually don't drink it at all in the States, but there is some association for me between fresh milk and African cows. Now I have to modify that association to Kenyan cows.'

Isn't this just shocking - that it's cheaper to get fake milk than the real deal is just unbelievable. Yet the same thing happens in the U.S. as well. Most of your small farmers in America can't legally sell milk to their community members because of such strict government regulations set forth really only to benefit big industrial producers. Anyway, I'm not going to go off on a tangent, but it's just interesting to for me to now realize how the inability to procure fresh milk in Nigeria raises my annoyance just as much as the the difficulties surrounding purchasing local food in the States. For example, today in the supermarket, it was SHOCKED to find that goats cheese from SPAIN was significantly cheaper than goats cheese from right here in Maryland! And this was at your 'go local/organic' Whole Foods!!

What's going in???

One of the things I've definitely noticed since I came back has been a change in my attitude to food. This is very strange because I was a pretty health (give a take a brownie or 4) conscious before left. I think I've always had a thing for gardeners, farmers and people who know a thing or two about food. I still remember my fascination with the live chickens at my grandmothers house in Liberia and how one minute I could be feeding them and the next they could be feeding me. I also remember a trip to a local farmer in Spain, milking a cow and then having that fresh milk as part of breakfast (adds a completely new meaning to 'whole milk')!

This appreciation for the people that grow food and take care of animals, and just generally giving more of a damn where my food comes from grew a lot stronger while living in Sudan. I haven't eaten red meat or pork in over ten years, but I certainly was not tempted when I actually got to see slaughter houses in Sudan. While this wasn't going to change my diet, listening to herders and butchers talk about their days, stresses about the market, and even the process of slaughtering and how to make it a clean and safe practice really opened my eyes. Of course, seeing a chicken being chased by Somehow in the morning, a random sharp cry (dying) while I was working, and then seeing a nice drumstick in the pot for dinner definitely made this point stick home for me.

I also loved the cyclical nature of everything. There, you can't eat mangos unless it's mango season and then you are eating mangos until the last one falls out of the last fruit-bearing tree. There are no strawberries (or a gazillion other fruits) because they just don't grow in that part of the world so you just live without them. And when it's any other time than harvest, you totally feel like you'd give a $1,000 bucks just to even SMELL a fresh green vegetable! If some of you remember my Planting Trees post, you will know how much even the simple act of planting tiny little seeds really fascinated me! For all my western gained knowledge, I can promise you that the Sudanese certainly have me completely defeated when it comes to actually having a clue about how to provide food for oneself!

So anyway, earlier this summer, while driving up to MA, I was listening to an interview on NPR with Barbara Kingsolver (think Poisonwood Bible) who was talking about her recent book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. She spent a year basically only eating what she could grow or buy from the local farmers. The interview had me so drawn in that I actually sat outside my friend's (one i hadn't seen in over a year) apartment waiting for the interview to end. While I had no crazy fantasies that I could do the same, it definitely influenced me to pay more attention. So for several weeks this summer, I got to know the local farmer's near my aunts (where I stayed a lot) and got to try new fruits and vegetables, and literally eating the best nectarines and peaches I've ever had. I even went gaga over heirloom tomatoes which basically add a WHOLE NEW MEANING to tomato!!!

Last night I started reading B. Kingsolver's book and besides reminding me of good food experiences in Sudan (which 99% of time DID NOT HAPPEN), just furthers my resolve to be a bit more conscious of what is going in and where exactly it's coming from! Besides the fact that Kingsolver is an AMAZING AMAZING writer, this book is really really good, but if you do have the time to read it, you can at least get a quick taste by listening to this interview.

Anyway - that's my mini ramble about food!

Karkaday

A favorite, very easy to make drink here in Sudan (and from what I hear it is popular all over the Middle East, especially Egypt, and also in West Africa), is called karkaday - basically hibiscus tea.

So the simple way to start is:
- rinsed karkaday (or hibiscus tea bags if that's what you have)
-boiling water
-sugar

Seep the tea for as strong as you like it and add sugar when the water is still hot. Let it cool off, add some ice cubes and there you go.

BUT.....why stay basic when there are sooo many better things you can add:
- my friend throws in fresh pineapple chunks (or basically any fresh fruit will do)
- you can also throw in cardamom and/or cinnamon sticks
- Martha Stewart adds apple juice, mint, ginger, etc

What I would really really like to try with my next attempt is Mint Iced Cubes
- boiling water
- handful of fresh mint leaves
- sugar

Mix everything together. Cool off. Freeze in ice tray until needed. I've actually tried this before and it is really great with just about everything.

Now I'm just sitting back in this melting heat of Juba and imagining a cool glass of karkaday with sugary mint melting and mixing and becoming just ready for me to drink!