Zom

I've been wanting to cook some more African dishes while we're still experiencing serious tropical heat here in Miami. I don't often match action to thought on this, but I think cuisines are best experienced in the climate that spawned them. This particular dish is from Cameroon. I found it while looking for alternative sources for African recipes since my latest not-entirely-satisfactory experience working from the Congo Cookbook. I found one version at the Fair Trade Cookbook and another in Celtnet's collection of world recipes. Both call for spinach, but that's probably substituting in for the local green, bitterleaf, so I'm going to use callaloo instead. Unfortunately, I got a small bunch from the CSA this week so I'm using under one pound to replace two pounds of spinach, but callaloo won't wilt away nearly as much, so I think I'm still in fair shape.

Ingredients:
2 pounds beef suitable for stew, cut into 1 1/2-inch cubes
4 Tablespoons cooking oil
1 large onion, thickly sliced
1-2 pounds medium weight greens, coarsely chopped
2 medium tomatoes, chopped or 1 can diced tomatoes, drained
2 Tablespoons tomato paste
2 Tablespoons natural peanut butter
chili pepper flakes to taste
salt and black pepper to taste
a squeeze of lemon for each serving

1. Season the beef with salt and, using as much of the cooking oil as necessary, brown in batches in a large pan. Remove the beef to a pot (I used my slow cooker), salt a little more and cover with just enough water to cover, approximately four cups. Bring to a boil and simmer for around 1 1/2 hours, until the meat is just starting to get tender. Drain the beef broth you just made. Reserve two cups for this dish and keep the rest to use later (bonus!).

2. Add the remaining oil to the pan you browned the beef in, heat to medium and add the onion. Fry, browning slightly and scraping up the stuck on beefy bits. When the onion is soft, add to the pot (deglazing the pan with the reserved beef broth if necessary), along everything but the lemon. Stir a bit to get the tomato paste and peanut butter dissolving. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for 30 minutes, until the beef is tender and the tomatoes are falling apart. Adjust seasonings and serve over rice or millet.

And here it is:


I dunno. It's not actively bad but it's not great either. Maybe it's me; I keep getting exciting about trying regional African cuisines but peanut butter and tomatoes are just peanut butter and tomatoes, not some revelatory experience. The flavors just don't blend into anything excitingly synergistic. I can say that the callaloo works well with that combination and stands up to a half hour in the stew pot better than spinach can. That's the best I can say for the dish, though.

I've done a bit more research, and I think, instead of Cameroonian zom, I should have made Tanzanian mchicha. According to a few different sources, amaranth is common in East Africa. A few even say mchicha is the Swahili word for it. The recipes I've found call for spinach, but I'm comfortable saying that they're substituting for callaloo. They also add coconut milk and curry powder to the mix, which I think will help the peanut butter and tomatoes get along better. That certainly sounds much better than how the zom turned out, but then the zom recipe sounded better than how the zom turned out too. Next time I've got some callaloo, I'll just have to try it and see.

Casamance Stew

This is another recipe that I downloaded from a recipe archive before the Web existed. It's different from the pork and tomatillo stew I made earlier this week in a few interest ways, though. First, because of it's much more unusual name it managed to almost fully colonize it's namespace on the web; all but one "casamance stew" you'll find online is this recipe. Second, I was able to definitely track it back to its origin. This is a variation on a recipe from the Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant cookbook printed in the October 24, 1990 issue of the New York Times. And third, there is no indication that anyone other than I has ever actually cooked it. Not one review, not one comment and the biggest change anyone has made in the recipe is adding paragraph breaks. OK, that's not true; one guy suggests a parsley garnish.

A little research that I really should have done beforehand reveals that Casamance is a region on the south coast of Senegal and that this stew is actually a tinkered up version of poisson yassa. And while I'm sure the good folks in the Moosewood Collective meant well, the yassa recipes look a lot better and there's one change that really screws up this recipe. Let's see if you can see it without prompting.

Ingredients:

Marinade:
1/2 cup fresh lemon or lime juice
1/2 cup white vinegar
2 tablespoons tamari soy sauce (this is clearly a substitute for Maggi seasoning so I used that instead. Click on the Senegalese tag for more info on Maggi seasoning.)
2 tablespoons peanut oil
1 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper
3 cloves minced garlic
2 or more jalapeno chiles, seeded, minced

Everything else:
1 1/2 pounds monkfish or other firm fish fillets (I used whiting. According to my notes on the recipe, I used sea bass the first time around.)
4 cups sliced onions
2 cups sweet potatoes, cut into 1-inch cubes
1 teaspoon peanut oil,
1 chopped red bell pepper
salt to taste

1. Combine marinade ingredients (1st 7 items).

2. Rinse the fish well and cut into serving size pieces. Layer about half the onion slices in a glass baking dish. Pour some marinade over them. Then add fish and rest of onions, pour marinade over them. Cover and refrigerate overnight or all day.

3. When ready to cook, set the fish aside. Pour marinade off the onions and set aside. Cover cubed sweet potatoes with cool, salted water, bring to a boil then simmer until just barely tender.

4. Meanwhile, in heavy pan, gently saute onions in peanut oil for 15 minutes. Add red bell pepper and cook for another 5 minutes. Combine onion, bell pepper with sweet potatoes and marinade and simmer 20 minutes.

5. While vegetables simmer, briefly broil or saute fish til lightly browned on both sides.

6. Add fish to simmering vegetables and continue to cook 15 minutes more. Salt to taste.

Serve in wide shallow bowls on steaming rice or millet.



Did you see the problem there? Someone changed the sensible hour marination to a full day. If you have much cooking experience you'll realize that a day in vinegar and lemon juice is going to do some serious pickling to that fish. And if you've been reading this blog for a while you'll know that's precisely why I cooked this. Foolishly, perhaps, I assumed that the recipe author knew something I didn't and what looked like a step that would ruin the dish would instead make it something unique and wonderful. I really should have known better.

The fish was badly overcooked chemically before any actual cooking that the recipe calls for. And even if it needed cooking, browning was clearly not going to happen as the fish was waterlogged from its lengthy soak. All the attempt achieved was prompting the fillets to break apart. The 15 minutes of extra cooking time was out of the question.

It's really a shame as, setting the fish's texture aside, the flavor combination is unusual, interesting and not bad at all. The tart sauce brightens up the savory onions and peppers and balances the sweetness of the sweet potato. My salvage attempt on the dish was to treat the fish like salt cod and break it up into chewy flakes. I found that the sauce gets caught up in the flakes so it's more of a hash than a stew at this point and each bite tastes mainly of fish and caramized onion moistened by the sauce. It really tones down the overwhelming vinegariness of the sauce and if the fish didn't taste like canned tuna it would be pretty good.

Doesn't mean I'm going to make it again, though. Next yassa I make is likely to be this one which looks to be different in some rather interesting ways.

mafé - groundnut tomato stew

If you watched Top Chef this week you'll have seen one of the judges, Chef Tom Colicchio, repeatedly disparaging one dishes' combination of tomatoes and peanut butter as if he had no idea that it's a traditional West African combination (as traditional as an African combination of two new world plants can be, anyway). The chef who made it was clearly going for a standard chicken in peanut sauce--she served it over couscous so she knew the African origins and didn't just stumble on recipe independently--but if she explained that the fault lay in the preparation of the dish and not the conception, it didn't make it to air.

That's a problem I've had myself. I mean preparing a peanut-tomato dish, not malicious reality show editors making me look like a jerk. I've tried it a few different times and I've never come up with something worth eating. Colicchio's ignorance and/or lousy attitude was sufficient impetus for me to give it another shot.

I found a lot of different variations on the basic idea on-line, but I settled on this recipe for the Senegalese version, mafé, mainly because it hasn't been adjusted for American kitchens and sensibilities so I could do that myself.

I really wanted to use mutton or maybe goat but I've settled on buying my vegetables at Whole Foods in the CSA off season for lack of a better choice and their in-house butcher is more focused on semi-prepared meals for harried professionals than on offering a decent selection of meats or cuts. They didn't have any pork belly either so that dish is going to have to wait until I make a trip to Publix or maybe order something through the mail if I don't like the looks of what they've got. On the other hand Whole Foods does carry marrow bones so that should be a nice meal (and a post) some time soon. Anyway, I settled on beef given the choices offered. For vegetables, I've got a sweet potato and a carrot that should suit and my CSA yukina savoy survived all my refrigerator troubles fairly unscathed.

For the cooking method, I've discussed the better way to make stew in a Western kitchen (browning the meat and then a low slow braise in a 300 degree oven) before. You didn't get the full story then because that was a simple stew without any vegetables. Adding vegetables complicates things because they don't all take the same time to cook. For this recipe, I browned the beef, removed it from the pot, browned an onion and a couple jalapenos, returned the beef and stirred in two Tablespoons of tomato paste (I like the sort that comes in a tube) and a couple handfuls of roughly chopped cherry tomatoes. That would be two standard sized tomatoes if I could find any that taste anything like an actual tomato. And that goes into the 300 degree oven.




After an hour the tomatoes and beef juices have formed a rather nice sauce. The low heat keeps temperatures below boiling so it doesn't thicken and dry up. I stirred in the sweet potato and carrot and returned the pot to the oven.



After another half hour I added the yukina savoy.

After twenty more minutes I added a cup of fresh(ish)-ground unsweetened, unsalted peanut butter and enough water to thin the sauce out a bit. The original recipe says it's done now, but I put it back in the oven for ten minutes to let the flavors blend a little. Oh, and I should mention that the original recipe calls for Maggi sauce. From what I can dig up, that's an all-purpose sauce made from vegetable protein that tastes something like soy sauce. Whole Foods didn't carry it, but they did have a bottle of another brand of vegetable protein sauce at the salad bar. It seemed somewhere between soy sauce and Worcestershire sauce to me. I used just a little soy sauce in the mafé and, as I neglected to replace the Worcestershire after the big refrigerator melt-down, some Pickapeppa sauce which tastes surprisingly similar considering its complete lack of fermented fish.

So how did it taste? Like peanut butter. The one cup I added walked all over the other flavors. The tomato had cooked down, mellowed and blended with the other flavors over the two hours of cooking so it had no chance against the peanut butter. Stews generally taste better the second day so I'm hopeful the situation will improve, but for now it's one more failure in my peanut-tomato recipe history.


OK, it's tomorrow. The overnight flavor-melding doesn't seem to have helped much, but on the bright side I was able to get my hands on some Maggi sauce. I think the comparison to soy sauce must be more by way of use than flavor. There is a slight resemblance but Maggi sauce has smoky, vinegary and meaty notes you don't find anywhere in soy. I can see why it's a staple in West Africa as it goes beautifully with peanuts. Mixing in a generous amount gives a result something like satay peanut sauce. I think it salvaged the dish and the lack of it at Whole Foods was probably why the chef who made peanut chicken on Top Chef ended up in the losers' circle.

CSA week eleven - curried peanut-squash soup

The thought just jumped into my head yesterday: "Doesn't African peanut soup use squash?" and suddenly peanut soup was all I wanted. Even if you can't use squash in it, I was going to make some. As it happens, there are plenty of recipes for peanut soup that call for squash, butternut squash primarily. But a summer squash I've got so a summer squash I'll use.

My next concern was the peanuts. I knew that the peanuts were substituting for something called "groundnuts" and I wondered if there was a better simulation than just stirring in a couple tablespoons of Skippy. A bit of research turned up the fact that peanuts are in fact replacing an ingredient called Bambara groundnuts, but they're doing it in African agriculture. People just like peanuts better as a crop and as an ingredient. Peanuts have even taking over the name; when you're in a West African village market and you ask for groundnuts, you'll get peanuts. I was still confident that a jar of peanut butter wasn't the best substitute and I was fully prepared to mail order some boiled peanuts from South Carolina and make my own non-roasted paste. But, yes, the peanuts are supposed to be roasted. I did learn that the all-natural unsweetened unsalted ground-on-demand peanut butter from the health food store is the closest approximation so I did learn something useful out of all that research.

Most peanut soup recipes use tomatoes or tomato juice or at least salsa, but I've made that sort before and I really don't like the combination. Non-tomato varieties are rare, but I found one I liked the look of here. I'm not sure the curry spices are entirely traditional but what the heck.

I made the recipe as written, but realized too late that the 20 minutes simmering was too much for a summer squash. So I added a cup of bay scallops with the peas to give a similar firm bite to a not-overcooked-squash. The end result is pretty nice with a lot of different interesting flavors playing well together.

You could easily use vegetable broth instead of the chicken to make this a vegan dish. Or add chicken to make it more substantial. Using a citrusy Singapore curry blend instead of a straight Madras mix would be an interesting variation. I might add some chunks of white fish filet to that, too. Now I'm thinking that the Singapore variation would be really good; I'll have to remember that one for next time.