We have had generally good luck with southeast Asian food so far.  Cambodia, Laos, East Timor, and our three Indonesian meals were all bangers. (I mean “very good,” not “British sausages” here.) We were less happy with Brunei, but I think that’s more down to skill and ingredients than it is to any inherent flaw with the cuisine.

But seriously – if you’re looking for some great food ideas, go check out any of those entries and give them a shot.

So we were excited for Malaysia.  We picked out two dishes to make, since that’s not too much work to do all at once, right?

Fortunately,  we came to our senses and decided to make one for lunch and the other for dinner, since it was Victoria day.  (Yay, Canada!)

For lunch, we decided to go with a strong candidate for the national dish of Malaysia – nasi lemak, which literally means “rich rice.”  It’s rice cooked in coconut milk, flavoured (yay, Canada!) with a panda leaf.

Wait, what?

Typos aside, that is a pandan leaf, which has a lovely sweet fragrance, and flavours the rice beautifully.  All we had to do was toss the rice, leaf, and coconut milk into the rice cooker and press “go.”  This is easy – why did we decide not to do both dishes at once, again?

Just like building an IKEA bookshelf, there appear to be a few ingredients left over here.  What’s going on?

Well, nasi lemak isn’t just about the rice – it’s also about the accompaniments.  Most important is the sambal, which is one of those generic words like “salsa” or “curry” that has to be narrowed down a bit.

The sambal we’re making here involves first soaking some chilies and tamarind.

Sorry, did I say “some” chilies?  I meant “many”. Many, many.

Once those are softened up, they get tossed in a blender with onions, garlic, and tiny, tiny anchovies, which we last encountered in our first Indonesian meal.  After a quick blitz, the paste gets fried for a solid twenty minutes, until the oil separates.

Here’s what it looked like at the start of cooking:

And twenty minutes later, at which point we also added dark soy sauce and the tamarind.

In addition to the sambal, we also fried some peanuts and more of the anchovies, and sliced up a cucumber.  This may be some of the best presentation we’ve accomplished on here.

Are we ready to be world famous food bloggers yet?  Or even famous world food bloggers? I mean, no, of course we aren’t.  But that’s still a great picture.  And you know what else is great?

Nasi Lemak, that’s what.  The rice was delicious all by itself, but paired with the variety of flavours and textures from all the accompaniments it was an absolutely amazing meal.

OK – what’s for dinner?

A street food dish called Char Kway Teow, which literally means “stir fried flat rice noodles.”  It consists of the titular ingredient blasted in the hottest wok you can arrange with a dark sauce that caramelizes onto the noodles.  This thing goes FAST, so all you’re getting pictures of is the ingredient list, followed by the dish – there was absolutely no time for photography while the cooking was happening.

Here’s our ingredient family photo:

Note the three different kinds of soy sauce plus oyster sauce.  That’s going to make the dark, sweet sauce that will provide the base of the flavour here.  Also pictured, Chinese chives, shrimp, rice noodles, garlic, Chinese sausage, fish balls (snerk.), eggs, and bean sprouts.

From that, our mise en place:

Ready, set, BAKE! er… I mean STIR FRY!

Oh yeah – that’s the stuff. Actual cooking time was something like 90 seconds, but we were super busy the whole time. And as you can see – the result was pretty exciting.  Trust us, it tasted as good as it looks. The sweet savoury salty sauce stuck to all of the other ingredients beautifully.  I’m getting hungry again just looking at this.

Malaysia was fantastic.  Rather than getting too worked up about Queen Victoria, let’s be happy that one of the countries her empire oppressed has REALLY amazing food.

Next up, the Maldives!

Recipes:
Nasi Lemak
Char Kway Teow

Whenever we discover that there’s some food item that is regarded as quinessentially associated with a country, we prick up our ears a bit.  It’s often so challenging to distinguish neighbors, that anything that is definitely from our target country is welcome news.

In this case, we discovered that there is a hot sauce that is made in Malawi, associated with Malawi, and eagerly sought by Malawian expatriates. It also costs three times as much for shipping as it does for the actual bottle.

It is called Nali sauce, and friends – that label is not joking. The ingredients here are birds eye chilis, paprika, onions, and vinegar.

That’s OK, we like spicy.

So that’s Malawi sorted.

Wait a moment – don’t we need some sort of recipe to go with this?  As much fun as doing Nali shots sounds, shouldn’t we make some actual, you know, food?

And there we ran into difficulty. If I asked you to name a quinessential BRITISH sauce, you’d probably say “HP Sauce.”  Or else “Please go away and stop asking me questions about condiments.”  But either way – a sauce is not a recipe, and while HP is a classic UK sauce, that doesn’t mean you’d necessarily use it to make Boopers and Sploot, or whatever the hell the national dish is. (We don’t do research more than one country ahead.)

So returning to our old friends at United Noshes, (And by friends, I mean “people who have no idea we exist”) we discover that a common use for this stuff is on… fish and chips.  OK, we can do that.  Or rather, we can fry some fish and go pick up some french fries from our friendly neighborhood restaurant with a deep fryer.

I made a simple batter of flour and egg, which completely failed to adhere to the tilapia we selected.  The cooked fish was still good, but was completely uncoated.  The other topping in addition to Nali sauce was shredded cabbage soaked in vinegar.

In addition to that, let’s make the ACTUAL national dish of Malawi, which is another variant on a simple starch paste.  This one is called Nsima, and is made with fine corn flour, such as is used to make tortillas.

Flour, water, heat, stir.

I don’t mean to be dismissive – this actually turned out to be one of the tastier ones we’ve made, and we have no idea why. It doesn’t even have any salt.

The degree to which the Ndima is intended to be the star of the show is indicated by the fact that the accompanying vegetable stew, (Ndiwo) is referred to as a “relish.”  There’s a zillion recipes for these things, but the one we used called for greens (we used amaranth), tomatoes, onion, and salt.

Red amaranth sure is pretty.

So our final meal consisted of a very traditional dish of cornmeal paste and vegetable stew, as well as a modern one of fish and chips with cabbage and hot sauce.

Trust me, there IS fish under all those fries and cabbage.  You’d THINK that we’d just be hurrying past the cornmeal and veg to get to the fish and chips, but you know what?  We weren’t.  Still can’t explain exactly why, but this particular starch paste was really good, and it was even better the next day reheated.  The vegetables spoke for themselves, and combined nicely with the Nsiwa.

Which is not to say that french fries, fish, and hot sauce aren’t delicious, because they totally are.  And the crunchy sour cabbage was a nice contrast, as well as soaking up the SERIOUS heat from the Nali sauce.

All in all, a quite memorable meal.  Next up, Malaysia!

Recipes:
Nsiwa and Ndimo
Fish and Chips: Seriously – go buy some french fries, fry some fish, and put hot sauce and cabbage on it.

*Taps Music Stand*

*Signals to Chorus*

“MAAAAAAAAA-DAGASCAR Where The Lemurs Come Roaring Off The Plains!”

ahem.

That is probably not how that goes.  I don’t think lemurs can roar.

But they are strictly confined to the island of Madagascar.  When Leigh and I were first dating, over twenty years ago (twenty…? Jesus Christ…), we somehow managed to gift each other not one but TWO stuffed lemurs, which we still have to this very day.  Their names are Chocolate and Vanilla.

Oddly, despite the fact that the island is known for it, we managed not to include any actual vanilla in this meal.  Then again, we didn’t include any lemur either, so there you are.

We should really get on with this.  There are 17 “M” countries, so there’s no time to waste.

So what are we actually making?  The most plausible candidate for a national dish of Magadascar as far as I can tell is Romazava, a dish of zebu meat containing anamalaho greens.  Neither of which are we going to be able to acquire, so that’s off to a good start!

Zebu is at least just a type of cattle, so we’ll be fine there just using beef.  Anamalaho, on the other hand, is sort of key, since it imparts a numbing spice similar to Sichuan pepper.  Given that we’re not going to be getting that either, we used dandilion greens, on the theory that they would give a somewhat peppery flavor.  In addition, we mixed in spinach and watercress, as suggested by our recipe source.

Past that, it’s a pretty standard beef stew. We do, of course, begin by chopping and sauteeing an onoin.  It’s the law.  Here is stock onion frying photo #34591:

You then brown the beef for a bit with the onions, then toss in a mix of ginger, garlic, green chili, tomatoes, salt, and pepper.  Simmer for a while, then add water, and let it braise with the greens for an hour.

Bim bam, easy.  What about a side dish?  We give you Lasary Voatabia – the world’s least complicated salad.  Tomatoes, scallions, salt, and hot sauce of your choice.

Gotta remember this one – it is ludicrously easy and really good.

And here’s our meal, along with a pile of basmati rice for serving.  (Apparently rice with EVERYTHING is the norm in Madagascar.)

Doesn’t that look tasty?  Unlike a number of the other African stews we’ve made where we committed to using the RIGHT leaves, at the expense of dealing with them frozen, here we used fresh leaves.  This may not have been perfectly authentic, but oh my goodness – the improvement in texture is SO worth it.

And this meal was great!  The stew was well seasoned, the peppery greens had lots of personality, even after the long cook time, and hotsauce tomatoes were a great side.  We don’t do a lot of these meals on weeknights, but this one posed no difficulties at all.

Next up, Malawi!

Recipes:
Romazava
Lasary Voatabia

At Yale, there’s a saying: “Your Veritas sucks if you ain’t got no Lux.”  I could explain that, but it’s not worth the effort, really.

I think a BETTER saying for today’s post would be “Your Benelux sucks if you ain’t got no Lux,” since it refers to the subject of today’s meal – Luxembourg!  We both think we’ve PROBABLY been there, but we’re not certain.  It would have been something like 20-30 years ago if we have.

Luxembourg is a big country by small country standards, with over 15 times the total area of Liechtenstein.  But it’s a small country by Big Country standards, having never achieved a #17 hit on the UK pop charts with a song named “Luxembourg.”

For this meal, we are making the acknowledged national dish of Luxembourg, Judd mat Gaardebounen, or smoked pork collar with fava beans.  So to start with, we had to go shopping for the two key ingredients.

Smoked pork collar I found at a local eastern European butcher.  This kind of smoked meat is quite salty, so it’s necessary to soak for a long time to remove some of the brine.

Weirdly, one of the recipes I found for this says you can smoke a pork neck yourself by putting it on a rack in a dutch oven, putting rice and herbs under it, and heating the pot until the herbs start smoking.

This strikes me as nonsense, and the pictures of their results would seem to confirm it.  The fully “smoked” pork in their recipe looked grey, rather than ham-colored pink like ours did.

At any rate, the actual cooking process once you’ve soaked your pork is pretty straightforward – you just boil it for several hours along with a bunch of aromatics like carrots and leeks.  There IS an onion in this recipe, as per usual, but in this case it only gets chopped in half and has a few cloves stuck in it.

Which leaves us to talk about the much more labor intensive part of this recipe – the fava beans.  While on my shopping trip, I picked up a bag of dried fava beans, but then to my great surprise, the next store I walked into had them fresh.  In Canada, in February.  Definitely not what I was expecting.

We’ve never cooked with these things before, and they are kind of monsters. They look like this when you first get them.

Those have to be shelled, and the inner beans look like this.

Those beans have to be blanched, i.e., tossed in boiling water for a few minutes, and then dropped in ice water to stop cooking.

And then…. you have to peel them some MORE!

The final peeled, blanched beans have a lovely green color (mostly) and a taste that’s like a lima bean but a bit milder.  These are prepared with a velouté sauce.

Wait… a velouté sauce?  Is this… is this FRENCH cooking?  Oh dear.  OK, let’s figure this out.

First, you make a roux with flour and butter.  Different recipes disagreed on the color of the roux, and the associated cooking time.  We went with about 10 minutes of constant stirring and a medium blonde color.

Next, you go in with stock (from the pork) and wine. Now, our local liquor store din’t have any Luxembourg wine, but we did find a Riesling from very nearby. (Nearby to Luxembourg, not nearby to the liquor store.)  Neither Leigh or I were terribly familiar with Rieslings, but we were a bit taken aback by the Wikipedia subsection: “Petroleum notes in aged Riesling wines“.

We didn’t detect any petroleum ourselves, fortunately.

Once the sauce has thickened, you toss in the beans and your seasoning.  The recipe calls for fresh savory, and we subbed that (as suggested) with sage and thyme.  However, we forgot to reduce the quantity for dried, rather than fresh herbs, so it took on a bit of a grey cast.  It didn’t TASTE overseasoned, but it looked somewhat weird.

Finally, we parboiled some new potatoes, fried them in oil, and then let them soak up some more of the stock.

And here’s our final spread.

Not bad, right?  The pork is the healthy pink color it’s supposed to be, and was still a nice chewy texture.  The beans were OK by themselves, but great scooped onto a bite of pork.  And finally, what’s not to like about fried potatoes in pork stock?  We drank the rest of the wine, and it was a nice accompaniment.

So that’s Luxembourg! I’d make the pork part again, although I’m not sure fava beans are worth the effort.  Next up, the “M” countries, starting with Madagascar.  And there are a LOT of M countries, so we’ll be here a while.

Recipe:
Judd mat Gaardebounen

Some of these meals go better than others.

Sometimes it’s clear we’ve made pretty close to exactly the dish that was intended, and we decide that it’s just not our favorite.  No shade on national foodways, just individual preferences.

And sometimes it’s clear that we just didn’t get there.

This, friends, is one of the latter.  I’m pretty sure we hit the flavor spot on (and the flavor was great!) but in terms of appearance or composition?

Well, the salad was pretty close, anyway.

So – Lithuania.  The third of the three Baltic states, along with Estonia and Latvia. The national dish is something called a Cepelinai, which literally means “Zeppelin.”  That’s right – we’re making potato blimps!

First off, you make a fairly simple filling of pork and onions.

Pretty typical fare for a pork meatball.  Just for variety, let’s NOT take a picture of chopping an onion.  After all, this filling isn’t precooked – it’s just mixed together and left to chill a bit while you mess with the potatoes.

SO MANY POTATOES.

First, you take a small quantity of potatoes, boil and rice them  Ricing a potato is a task made much easier by a tool called a potato ricer.  Which we don’t have.

Then you take a lot MORE potato and you shred it.  And I think this is where we went wrong.  We used the “grater” attachment on our food processor to grate the potatoes, because who has time to hand grate four entire Idaho Russets with a microplane?

People who actually know how to make Lithuanian food correctly, that’s who. Although the shredded potatoes matched the images in the recipe we were using, when I went and checked a few more sites, their shreds were much smaller than the ones we got.

Another possible point of failure is the next step, where you take that shredded potato and attempt to squeeze out as much moisture as you possibly can.  Ideally using cheesecloth.  Which we also didn’t have.

Using a dishtowel and a TON of arm force (seriously, between this and last week, why aren’t I buff yet?) we got out quite a bit of liquid, but possibly not enough.  It’s also possible that the potato starch that was supposed to be in the liquid got trapped in the towel, because when we tried to pour off the liquid and keep the starch we didn’t get much.

We also may have just done a crap job of pouring off the liquid.

So at any rate, we now have a bowl of riced potatoes, a bowl of dry potato gratings, and a (very small) bowl of potato starch.  Those then get recombined together to make the cepelinai dough.

We then make large dumplings out of this dough and the pork filling.

A layer of dough, a dollop of filling, combine and you have your Zeppelins:

Now obviously, these are called Zeppelins because they are quite large for a dumpling.  But honestly, if I had to describe their size and shape, something else comes to mind.  What was it, again?

Oh right.  A potato.

Seriously, we just painstakingly disassembled a whole pile of potatoes just so we could reassemble the same number of potatoes, but with meat inside.  Cool.

And if we had stopped there, our dumplings would have looked more or less exactly like the ones in the recipe, just MASSIVELY less safe to eat.  However, we decided that we would prefer our pork cooked, and not knowing what was in store, we tossed these into boiling water for 25 minutes.

While that was going on, we made the dressing and the salad.  Remember earlier, when I said I wasn’t going to show a picture of chopped onions in this one?

I lied.

The dressing for these dumpling is made from bacon, onions, and sour cream.  You try to time it so the onions and bacon are cooked just as the dumplings are ready, then you mix in the sour cream at the last minute and put the dressing over them.  We did succeed at getting the dressing on the table at the right moment, and we put them over…

Well, let’s do the salad, first.

This won’t take long – it’s a simple chopped salad, so all we have to do is show the ingredients.

Prunes, walnuts, beets, lemon juice, and olive oil.  In the summer, mayonaise would be more typical than the lemon juice / olive oil combination, but I think we’d probably still prefer this version.

OK, I can’t put this off any longer – what happened to the dumplings?

Well, whether it was insufficient potato starch, insufficiently riced potatoes, too large a grate size on the grated potatoes, too much moisture, bad assembly technique, or (most likely) a combination of all of those, they completely fell apart in the boiling water.

So instead of potato blimps, we had bare meatballs, floating in a pot of boiled potato shreds.

But to be clear – everything was still COOKED.  You still had cooked potato shreds and a cooked meatball. So we just sort of made a big pile of stuff and dumped dressing on it.

Less, “Zeppelin”, and more “Hedgehog.”  Google Translate helpfully informs me that the Lithuanian word for hedgehog is “ežys”.  So we made that.

And you know what?  It was delicious.  Potato, pork, onion, bacon, sour cream?  These are classic flavors, and they work no matter what kind of Erinaceidae you shape them like. And while I hadn’t had prunes in a salad before, this was an excellent combination.  If we were to make this again (not unlikely), I would try to get some really good olive oil, as the flavor of the oil was well featured in the balance of flavors.

OK, Lithuania – we may have butchered your national dish, but it was still tasty nonetheless.  Maybe you will try our Ežys version in the future?

Maybe not.

Next up: Luxembourg, and then on to the Ms!

Recipes:

• Cepelinai
  • The one we used
  • The one we SHOULD have used
• Beet Salad

Ever since we’ve been together, which at this point is now 22.5 years and counting, Leigh and I have joked that we want to take a tour of the tiny countries of Europe.  Not Luxembourg, of course, that’s WAY too big.

No, we’re thinking Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco, San Marino, and the Vatican.

As this tour is not terribly PRACTICAL, we have yet to accomplish it.  But hey – it’s only been a quarter century – we’ve got time.  And we WILL likely be visiting Liechtenstein this summer, so stay tuned for exciting pictures of (checks notes) llamas. Wait, what?

At any rate, this entry deals with the tiny country of Liechtenstein, located high in the Alps between Switzerland and Austria.

Two fun facts about Liechtenstein:
1. It has now lost two games in a row to the worst soccer team in the world.
2. Famously neutral Switzerland has either invaded or fired artillery into Liechtenstein numerous times in the last 60 years. Despite this, the two countries still somehow have very close relations.

There are two plausible candidates for national dish of Liechtenstein, and neither is terribly difficult to make, so we did both.  Let’s start with the less decadent one – Ribel.

Ribel is a porridge made of corn meal and milk. Boil milk with a little butter and salt, add corn meal, remove from heat, wait fifteen minutes.  It’s so quick we didn’t even get a picture of the preparation, although you’ll see it in our final picture.  Ribel is often eaten for breakfast, with jam or sour cheese.  Not much more to say about it, honestly.

So let’s get on to the MORE decadent one – Käsknöpfle!

Knöpfle is the Swiss German term for spaetzle, little chewy pasta bits that you may be familiar with.  We made a somewhat related Hungarian version, nokedli, when we did that meal. Käs, on the other hand, is the Swiss German word for cheese. Pasta covered in cheese.  Oh my god, what’s not to like HERE?

OK, so first order of business was to acquire cheese.  As long as you use a mix of alpine cheeses, you’re going to be in the right ballpark.  We went with Apenzeller and Gruyere:

However, a truly authentic Liechtensteiner Käsknöpfle also uses something called “Sura Käs”, literally “sour cheese.”  This is a regional specialty from the Swiss / Liechtenstein / Austrian Alps that DOES NOT travel well, and as such is basically impossible to find in North America.

After some conversation with the friendly staff at the cheese shop, we decided that an appropriate way to get some tangyness into the mixture would be to use French “fromage blanc.”

This stuff’s pretty good – it basically tastes like mild sour cream, with a texture closer to cream cheese.  I’ve been eating the leftovers spread on bread with jam for breakfast.

Much grating later, and we had a big bowl o’cheese.  Which I appear to have forgotten to photograph.  Fortunately, I did get a picture of a cutting board full of onions, because lord knows there’s no way I couldn’t have just borrowed one of those from literally any prior entry in this blog.

But no, rest assured, dear reader, that these are the ACTUAL onions we used for THIS recipe.  We spare no effort for authenticity.* (*note: we spare MANY efforts.)

OK, cheese grated, onions browning, time to make the dough – and here is where we ran into a slight problem.  We grabbed a family recipe from r/Liechtenstein that sounded nicely authentic.  However, it turns out the author had made a SLIGHT typo in their units, and called for 100 cL of water instead of 100 mL of water.

When you put 10 times the amount of water called for in a dough recipe, it becomes batter.

To be fair, this is really my fault – I should have looked at the amount of flour, looked at the LITER of water ready to go, and thought to myself, “Self: you have done a lot of cooking at this point.  Perhaps you should maybe double check this against another recipe before you pour this all in.” Sadly, dear reader, I did not.

The author of the reddit post was quite gracious when we asked about it later, and the post has since been corrected.  And once we adjusted, the recipe was great, so we’re very grateful to them for sharing it.

Just to see what would happen, we tossed in a cup of sugar and tried baking this, and it turns out what happens is a thick, gummy, pancake.

Could have tried baking it longer, I suppose.  But who has time to pay attention to the leftovers when there are CHEESY DUMPLINGS to be made?!?

Second batch of batter mixed (we used double the eggs, in line with a few other recipes we found), and allowed to sit for a little bit, we were just about ready to go.

Now all we needed was a Knöpflehobel.

“A what now?” we hear you ask.  A Knöpflehobel!  Actually, we didn’t have one of those, so we used a Spaetzle press that my colleague Stephan was kind enough to loan us. Eggs for scale.

This is a NON trivial piece of kit.  And the dough is quite thick, so forcing the dough through the press into a pot of boiling water took some serious effort.  I don’t always make Käsknöpfle, but when I do – it’s arm day.

These things actually cook pretty quick.  Only a minute or two in the boiling water, and out they come.  After a few batches, we had a bowl full of dumplings.

At this point, all that was left to do was dump the käs into the knöpfle, mix well to let everything blend and get gooey, and then plate everything up with some applesauce and cherry jam.  Our local liquor store, which is generally excellent, somehow failed to have ANY Liechtensteiner beer in stock, so we went with a nice Austrian lager instead.

From upper right, working clockwise, Käsknöpfle with fried onions, Riebel with cherry jam, applesauce. Not the most chromatically varied meal, but oh my goodness… who cares? The cheese on the knöpfle was gooey and pungent and AMAZING.  Could probably have used even a little more tartness from the fromage blanc, but this recipe is unquestionably a winner.

The Reibel was fine – a bit less exciting, but a good side dish.  The jam was definitely an important part of keeping it interesting.  And the apple sauce did help cut the richness of the Käsknöpfle.  All in all, an excellent meal, and I can’t wait to try the real thing when we’re in Peru this summer.  I mean Liechtenstein.

Llamas? Really?

Next up, back to the Baltics!

Recipes:
Käsknöpfle – (We used 8 eggs instead of 4)
Riebel – (The recipe says “1/3 water and 2/3 milk.”  Pretty sure that means 1/3 LITER of water and 2/3 LITER milk.)

For our third African country in this streak, we head to Libya, which makes for a nice variety – Lesotho in the far south, Liberia in the west, and Libya on the Medditeranean coast.

One fun thing we’re learning is the variety of different ways the same ingredients are used around the world.  I’ve joked that at some point we’ll run the statistics on how many entries on this blog start with “Now chop up an onion”, but there’s other parallels as well.

For example, our Irish meal was a lamb stew with barley.  THIS is a lamb stew with barley.  But despite the fact that the top line description is the same, these two dishes are (unsurprisingly) nothing alike.

For starters, rather than whole barley, this recipe calls for barley flour.  Now, we didn’t find barley flour at any of our nearby stores, but rather than go further afield, we just bought barley, and stuck it in a barely-on oven for a bit to dry it out. (or is that a BARLEY-on oven?  har, har, har)

We then fed it in batches through our spice grinder.  Took a bit, because barley is quite hard, and we didn’t want to burn out the motor, but eventually we had a nice bowl of barley flour.  Just to be sure, we sifted the bowl, and anything that didn’t make it through the sieve went back into the grinder for a bit.

OK, so – what are we DOING with this barley flour?  We’re making bazeen, one of the national dishes of Libya.  It consists of a single large dumpling, which is then broken apart and used to eat a spicy lamb stew.

Alright, what do we do first? It couldn’t possibly be chop up and sautee an onion, could it?

Natch.

Also visible in that picture are chopped green chiles and fenugreek seed.  We always have to pause when a recipe just calls for “fenugreek,” because both the leaves and the seeds are used in different parts of the world, and the taste is substantially different.  In this case, however, our original recipe had lots of pictures, so we were able to confirm that seeds were intended here.

To be clear, we don’t MIND that most recipes start with sauteeing onions, because sauteeing onions smell delicious, and the spices didn’t hurt that at all.

Next up, lamb, and in this case we used shoulder, because leg is three times as expensive. The recipe just shows this going in as big hunks, so big hunks we did.

This goes into the pot with the onions to brown a bit, and then in go the remainder of the spices and broth.  Spices in this case are garlic, tomato paste, tumeric (LOTS of tumeric), chili powder (lots of that, too), black pepper, and salt.

After the lamb has cooked for about an hour, you toss in some potatoes to cook in the by now extremely aromatic broth.

And with about 45 minutes to go on the stew, it’s time to get moving on our dumpling.  And at this point, I was starting to seriously doubt our process, since it was so unlike anything we’d done before.  But again – the initial recipe had PICTURES, so we could tell we were at least matching it.

To make the dumpling, you dump a mix of barley and wheat flour into a pot and pour boiling water around it.  You also make a well in the middle of the flour for water to bubble up into. And then… you don’t stir, and you don’t cover.  Which means that at the end of the cooking process you still have a whole bunch of visible, dry flour.

This can’t be right, can it?  It’s still largely a powder! But it is apparently a COOKED powder, so… that’s OK?

We decided to soldier on and see what happens.  Flour and water gets dumped into the stand mixer (or kneaded by hand, if you have asbestos fingers) and kneaded to a somewhat gluey dough.

And then supposedly you roll that dough into a big ball, but  … wait, that worked?

Huh.  OK, let’s plate this puppy.

This… looks almost exactly like the picture in the recipe, with the exception that we left out the hard boiled eggs, because we don’t actually LIKE hard boiled eggs. We were somewhat baffled that we had succeeded, but it appeared that we had.

The instructions say that you tear off pieces with your right hand and eat the stew that way. Problem: at no point is it revealed when you change “large hunks of potato and lamb” into “bite sized pieces of potato and lamb.”  So after one or two attempts at tearing bits of lamb off with our fingers, we just went and got cutlery.

It was definitely tasty, though!  The dumpling didn’t taste raw, and was a nice chewy sop for the stew.  The lamb and potatoes also both did good jobs of soaking up the sauce.  We had lots of leftovers on this one, and they all got eaten.

Next up, a country which has now lost two football matches in a row to the worst team in the world.

Recipe:
Bazeen

Liberia is a country in West Africa.  The simplest narrative is that it was settled by freed American slaves who wanted a less oppresive life back in the land of their ancestors. The capital is even named for U.S. President James Monroe.  What a nice story.

Except… it wasn’t exactly deserted when the colonists from the colonies arrived, and the Americo-Liberians treated the indigenous population pretty badly, not even allowing them citizenship until 1904.

Liberia was one of only two countries (the other being Ethiopia) NOT colonized by Europeans during the “scramble for Africa”, and supported the allies during World War II.  Then it had a couple of bloody civil wars.  It does, at least, seem to be doing OK at the moment.

So let’s talk food.  Unsurprisingly, Liberian food is a mix of colonial influences from America and local ingredients and customs. Meat and fish are more common than in some other parts of Africa, and the stew we ended up making used quite a bit of it.

All of our recipes today come from a Liberian recipe site on the Internet Archive, via United Noshes.

But first, shopping!  In particular, we needed some esoteric leaves, so it was back to the African grocery store I first visited for our Ghanaian meal. The same clerk was working there, and was just as puzzled as last time at the extremely caucasian person asking for extremely African ingredients.  But she was also super nice, just like last time, and as soon as I mentioned what we were doing, she remembered me from last time.

And with that, I had acquired two bags of leaves, and she threw in some plantains for free.

First bag of leaves:  Sweet Potato greens!  Once defrosted, these bear a striking resemblance to chopped spinach:

They don’t NOT taste like spinach, either.  But these greens form the base of a very hearty stew.  HOW hearty, you ask?  Here’s the bowl of meat:

That’s shrimp, beef, AND chicken. Not pictured: the smoked turkey ALSO called for by the recipe.  Annoyingly, the recipe calls for all the meat to be placed in a bowl, tossed with corn starch and seasoning, then sorted back out and fried separately to get the cooking time for each correct.  Next time, I’m just dividing the seasoning up and seasoning each pile one at a time.

OK, all the meat’s cooked – now what?

The recipe has a set of preparation steps involved in using fresh greens, all of which we skipped, because we only had frozen.  Next, you cook the greens for a LONG time with some onion.

Once that’s done, you toss in the cooked meat (which has now been sitting for 40 minutes – the sequencing on this recipe leaves something to be desired) and cook until warmed through, and you’re done!

This is a LOT of stew, but I wanted to use the entire bag of greens, so I halved the recipe to match the amount of greens.  That’s right – the full recipe calls for TWICE AS MUCH of this, and can clearly feed 8 or more people.

Observant readers will notice that I mentioned TWO bags of leaves.  That’s because the other dish we’re making is a Liberian rice dish called “check rice” or “chuck rice,” depending on the source.

This was… an interesting one.  If you look for pictures of this stuff online, it’s a rice dish with a beautiful light green color, and little flecks of greenery in among the pile of fluffy rice.  Ours… did not turn out like that.

The key ingredient in this dish is jute leaf, which last encountered in our meal from Chad. At the time, we quite liked it, but the bag we bought then was substantially different than the one we used here, not at the least because this time the bag we got was considerably larger, and shredded considerably finer.

Even the lady at the African grocer was at pains to make sure we understood JUST how gloopy these things are.

They are VERY gloopy.  United Noshes describes them as “astonishingly mucilaginous.” Like with the sweet potato leaves, one suspects they are VERY different fresh. But we did our best to cook them up with some parboiled rice.  Lovely and light green, this turned out not to be.

I’m pretty sure we did something SERIOUSLY wrong, but I’m not sure what.  It would be very interesting to try it again with the other bag of leaves.  At any rate – here’s dinner!

The flavors were great. What’s not to like about a big pile of assorted meat and fish with greens?  The sweet potato greens tasted like a milder counterpart to spinach.  The rice TASTED good.

But – everything was very gloopy.  The rice, in particular, was gloop personified.  The stew was good, but I couldn’t help but wish we’d been able to make it with fresh leaves, or even frozen whole ones.

As always, when a dish in this project isn’t to our taste, we want to stress that that’s never the fault of the dish – it’s either a) we executed it poorly, or b) our palates just aren’t accustomed to the beloved cuisines of other countries.

In this case, it’s probably a bit of both – we didn’t know what we were doing, we used low quality frozen ingredients, and we’re just not used to these textures.  I would definitely LOVE to try these dishes prepared with fresh ingredients by someone who knows what they are doing.

Something we don’t always talk about on this blog is leftovers.  There are often leftovers, because we don’t know enough about how to scale these recipes, or because we don’t want to have too much of an unusual ingredient left over and taking up pantry or fridge space.  (Despite that motivation, our pantry and fridge are, unsurprisingly, full of ingredients I can’t even remember how they got there.  What the hell is sand ginger, anyway?)

But just for fun, here’s some ways to use leftover Liberian sweet potato leaf stew:

1. Served over a big pile of regular white rice.  This worked really well – trying to soak up moist leaves with rice that was not ITSELF full of moist leaves worked much better.

2. In a tortilla with cheese and salsa.  Possibly blasphemous, but delicious.

3. Mixed into a cream cheese and mozzarella dip, a la spinach and artichoke dip.  But with meat, and no spinach or artichokes.  We’re definitely going to hell for this one, but it sure was good!

One more African country in this stretch – next up, Libya!

Recipes:
Sweet Potato Greens
Check Rice

Not to make excuses, but it’s been a really busy fall.  And Lesotho was tough to research. But here we are, three months after our last meal.

I’ve mentioned it before, but there are a number of other blogs doing a similar project to this one.  And among those, there’s… a range.

The gold standard was “Cooked Earth,” which absolutely bent over backwards for authenticity.  Tons of research, absolutely no ingredient substitutions.  If it was posted there, you could be more or less completely sure that you were, in fact, seeing an excellent attempt to replicate the food you would actually sample in the country in question.

However, this kind of approach was incredibly high effort.  The blog owner  went so far as to grow peppers from seed for one recipe.  The meals appeared infrequently, given the commitment, and eventually stopped at Chad.  Observent readers will note that we passed Chad something like four years ago.

The next tier down is “United Noshes.” While not QUITE as rigorous as “Cooked Earth,” the owners of United Noshes are very up front about their process, and they make explicit what their sources are and when they are making subsitutions.  They do extensive research, and frequently talk to natives of the country or people who have lived there.  They’ve received quite a bit of national media coverage, and we’d love to be invited to one of their meals before they finish. (Spoiler: we probably won’t be.)

We leaned heavily on Cooked Earth, and continue to lean heavily on United Noshes because they’re rigorous and cite their sources. We’d rather not JUST duplicate their recipes, but we could do a lot worse.

And then… there’s the rest of the cooking web.

We all know the joke. All you want is a lasagna recipe, but first you have to read through a lengthy story about the author’s childhood in Hoboken. But you know, we can’t really complain about THAT issue, because that’s literally all this blog is – we don’t even HAVE recipes, we JUST tell the story.  Frankly, I have no idea why you’re reading this.

The bigger problem is that there’s no way to tell where the hell the “authentic Basotho recipe” (Lasotho is the country, Basotho is the people) reposted by six different Instagram perfect white ladies from the midwest actually came from. They all just cite to each other, and are clearly cut and pasted from the same place.

On the theory that it’s not just a “Blink” situation where the recipes are stuck in a time loop, the recipes must have come from SOMEWHERE, but we’d like a BIT more to go on than that.

Our goal with this blog is NOT to present ourselves as experts, or a source for authentic cooking.  We’re looking to explore different foodways using alphabetical order as an inspiration.  As such we will never say “Try this authentic recipe from Lesotho!”, or “Basotho cuisine is amazing, as typified by this completely authentic recipe!.”

Rather, “We tried to make something that approximated Basotho cuisine.  In case you are interested, this was our experience, and here’s our sources.  Please feel free to use this as a starting point with those caveats in mind.”

Whew.  That’s a long introduction!  The reason it popped up for this meal in particular is that Lesotho is TOUGH to research.  It’s a quite poor country, and there’s apparently not a tradition of complex cuisines, so typical meals generally include dishes prepared simply with only a few ingredients. And dishes like that tend not to be terribly well documented.

But you know what – you can make some tasty food with just a few ingredients!

For our first dish, we’re making “bashed beef”.  This is very similar to the “Seswaa” we made for our meal from Botswana. You start with a hunk of brisket, and you boil it for several hours.

You then pound and/or shred the beef into small pieces.  This is where seswaa and Basothan bashed beef seem to diverge.  For the Botswanan recipe, the meat was dry fried to get crispy on the outside.  The Basotho version that we found is simmered with onions for an additional thirty minutes to make a thick, saucy coating.

At least, I think it is. Unfortunately, the source cited by United Noshes is a dead link, so we had to go to another food blog.  This LOOKS like the picture at United Noshes, anyway.

Pumpkin would probably be the most authentic vegetable to accompany this, but the beef recipe is part-and-parcel with a “potato and bitter greens” dish, so we made that.  Chard was available and fresh, so we went with that.

The potatoes and greens were finished with peanut butter at the very end, which is definitely a technique we’ve seen in other African recipes.  I’m a bit suspicious of the source, but I’m not going to argue that the results weren’t delicious, because they definitely were.

Finally, we made a simple stew of tomatoes, carrots, and onions. As simple as it was, this felt the most like something that you were likely to be served in Lesotho itself. The source of the recipe is a Peace Corps volunteer who spent extensive time in the country.

Put these together, and the final plate was colorful AND delicious!

Seriously, for such simple dishes, this was a stellar meal. The beef was rich and hearty, the carrot stew had a nice sweetness to it, and the potato dish was exceptional.  What’s not to like about peanuts and potatoes? We accompanied the meal with a bottle of ginger beer, since that’s a reasonably common South African drink.

And while dessert isn’t, apparently, a terribly common thing in Lesotho, we ran across this from another Peace Corps member:

“Desert, although not common in many traditional households, is almost always a baffling combination of jello and custard… Don’t ask. I have yet to discover why they can’t be served separately.”

OK, well – we can do that, can’t we?

What we can’t do, apparently, is take an even remotely decent PHOTO of Jello and custard.

And there you have it – a lot about our process, and a little about vaguely Lesotho adjacent food.  Next time, we remain in Africa for Liberia.

Recipes:
Lekhotloane (bashed beef) with Morogo-studded Potatoes
Tamati (tomato carrot stew) (This is the United Noshes link, so it includes everything they did for Lesotho)
Jello and custard: seriously, just read the instructions on the boxes.

We skipped Lativa, for supply chain reasons.

Specifically we needed a bag of something called “grey peas.”  While that doesn’t sound terribly appealing, our research assured us that the national dish of Latvia was Pelēkie zirņi ar speķi or “grey peas and bacon.” So grey peas it was.

The only problem is that it turns out that the only Latvian grocery store in Canada was in Toronto.  And they would happily ship us a $5 bag of peas for $30.  Um.

Fortunately, there was another way.  A good friend of ours lives in Toronto, and we would be seeing her in person in just a few weeks, so we asked her to smuggle a bag into Michigan, which we then smuggled back out again.

Our friend is in this picture, but is not the giant beaver:

To be clear, the beaver is our friend too.  Its name is Justin.

And now we had a bag of Latvian grey peas.  Which were brown.  And also labelled in Dutch.

But the internet assures us these are the right kind of peas.  Incidentally, the name “Kapucijners” is because the brown color of these grey peas is the same as the brown color of the robes worn by Capuchin monks.  Cappucino and Capuchin monkeys are also named for the same monks. None of which are grey.

So let’s make brown grey peas and bacon.  All the recipes for this dish are pretty similar, because this is a very simple dish, but we went with one from a Latvian grandma type on YouTube.  You can never go wrong with grandma videos.

The process is super easy.  You soak the peas overnight.  This could almost certainly be accelerated with a pressure cooker, but lacking specific directions for that, and having plenty of time, we just did the soak.

To prepare the dish, you boil the peas for an hour or so.  In a separate pan, you cook onion and bacon with some black pepper.

Then you combine the peas with the onions and the bacon and…

…actually, that’s it.

OK, what else shall we make to go with this?  How about a chilled soup?  That way we can pretend that it’s still summer, and not the start of the cold mud puddle that is a PNW fall.

The soup is also pretty simple.  You chop up and combine pickled beets, cucumber, radish, spring onion, parsley, dill, and hard boiled eggs, if you like that sort of thing. We don’t, so no eggs.  For liquid, you use kefir, a fermented milk we last encountered while making Icelandic rye bread.

Once you chop up the veg and pour in the kefir, you…

… oh wait, that’s done too.

There’s got to be SOMETHING difficult we could make for this meal.  Let’s make bread.  Bread is hard.  Here’s an “all the ingredients” picture for the bread.

Look at all those ingredients!  This must be hard.  First, you warm the buttermilk up to body temperature. Then you put everything in a bowl, and let the stand mixer go to town for fifteen minutes.  (Interestingly, this bread calls for 100% rye flour, which means it’s not going to rise all that much no matter WHAT we do to it.)

After pausing a few hours for the dough to not rise, you split it off to loaf pans, and try to ignore the fact that this dough feels more like the Play- than the bread variety. This would also have been an excelleint time to forcibly shape the bread a little better.

Once in the pans, we let it not rise for an additional half hour and then baked.  What we got out of the oven was… not the most attractive loaves of bread we had ever made.

It’s a nice cutting board, though, innit?  Gift from a friend.

Now, I’m being awfully dismissive of this bread, but you know what?  It honestly turned out pretty tasty.  The apple juice and buttermilk gave it a nice tangy kick, and while it was dense, it wasn’t tough.

So here’s our final spread – soup, peas, bread, and a can of sprats.  For our Estonian meal, we put Latvian sprats on a comnmercial loaf Estonian bread.  This time we put Latvian sprats on a loaf of bread we made ourselves.

In terms of cooking process, definitely one of the simpler meals we’ve made, but the results were excellent.  The beet soup was the standout – tart from the beets, creamy from the keffir, and redolent with dill.

I believe that’s the first time I’ve used the word “redolent” on this blog.  Sorry.  I’ll try not to let it happen again.

But the national dish – grey peas and bacon? Obviously comfort food.  The salty bacon and peas together made for a hearty and satisfying dish.  And like I said, the bread was completely acceptable, despite looking… well, like that.

We weren’t able to locate a bottle of balsam liqueur, which would have been the most appropriate drink, so instead we picked up a can of this not-at-all-Latvian beer:

A tasty meal, and we’ll be back in this neighborhood again in four countries or so.  But next up, Lesotho!

Recipes:
Grey Peas and Bacon
Chilled Beet Soup
Latvian Rye Bread