Burundi is a country without a lot of recipes on the internet.  Which is unsurprising, given that it is quite small. According to Wikipedia, it is the 142nd smallest country in the world at the time of this writing, coming in just larger than Lesotho, but smaller than Moldova.

In fact, just about every food blog that talks about Burundi refers to the same thing: a stew of plantains and kidney beans. In fact, while I assume this dish HAS a local name, I can’t even find it!  So beans and bananas it is.

The good news is that this dish is both vegan and gluten free, allowing us to invite our good friends Amanda and Christina over to share the meal.

The beans in this case are kidney beans, which I’ve had generally poor luck with in the past – getting them to an edible texture takes a lot of work.  So for this recipe, I soaked them a full day in advance.  Past that, the actual preparation is pretty simple: cook the beans for an hour, fry onions, plantains, and chilies in red palm oil, then toss them in with the beans to boil until thick.

The recipe said you could use ripe or green plantains, so we used one of each for comparison.

For sides, we made lenga-lenga, which most authentically would use amaranth leaves.  we still don’t have a source of those, so spinach it was.  Lenga-lenga is actually pretty simple as well – just leaves, onions, and tomatoes sauteed in more of the ubiquitous red palm oil with chili pepper.  (I used Piri Piri chilies, since they are African and also delicious.)

Finally, yet another variety of starch paste.  So far we’ve had pastes made from sago palm, taro root, and corn meal.  This one used cassava flour, but the same basic preparation – boiling water, starch, and stir until you think you’re going to break the spoon.

Here’s the full meal:

On the plate: Ubuswage and Lenga-lenga. In the bowl: Beans and Plantains.

The verdict? Well, if I ever make this again, I will definitely only be using ripe plantains.  The sweetness was really needed to balance the beans.  Also… even though they were soaked for nearly a day and cooked for over an hour – they were still too tough and bland for my taste.  Maybe I just don’t like kidney beans, but I’ll have to try really cooking the daylights out of them at some point to see if they get any better.

On the other hand, the Lenga-lenga was delicious – the piri-piri definitely made for a nice perky vegetable dish.  And this may be my favorite starch paste yet – it definitely had a nice chewy texture to balance the vegetables without being overly rubbery.

Here’s a group shot after the meal:

As you can see, the best part of these meals is always sharing new food with friends.

Next up, we depart Africa briefly for Cambodia, then right back for Cameroon.

Recipes:
Beans and Bananas and Lenga-Lenga

Cassava paste: Put about 1:2 ratio of flour into boiling water.  Stir until thick.  Is this authentic?  No idea – just took our best guess on this one.

Burkina Faso begins a run of a lot of African countries coming up – six of the next eight, including this one.  The variety of foods from the continent is stunning, but are we good enough researchers to make meaningful differentiations?  Probably not.

Fortunately, we’ll likely keep doing what we did for THIS meal, and just steal all the recipes from Cooked Earth. No shame in that, right?  We’re not pretending to be an amazing source of recipes for OTHER people, just documenting our own attempts for the three people that actually care.  (Hi mom!)

To be fair, I DID attempt to do some research on this one.  I discovered that Michigan State University has a cookbook collection, so I went to check out their one and only Burkinabe cookbook:

For starters – it’s in French.  This was a bit of a problem, as I don’t remember my two years of French from Ms. Carr’s class in 1988.  Second problem – as far as I can tell, this book is a SUPER colonialist attempt by a Canadian NGO to tell Burkinabe folks how to prepare their own traditional dishes in a way that’s more nutritional.  While that may or may not be a laudable goal, the whole thing comes across as horrifyingly patronizing.

And the third problem is the following:

Go ahead and Google translate “Chenilles” – I’ll wait.  Or you can just look at the picture.

*pause for Googling*

Even if I thought I could convince Leigh to eat caterpillars, I’m really not sure I can find a good local source of the edible kind.  And I’m not brave enough to just go out and scoop up wollybears and toss them into a pot.  You’d probably need to peel them or something.

So, back to Cooked Earth it was.  Fortunately, they had a set of very tasty looking recipes made with things we CAN find or order.

Starting with Zoom Koom, which is great fun to say.  Zoom Koom literally means “flour water” and is an extremely… hearty beverage served to start a meal.  It contains pineapple, ginger, tamarind extract, a pinch of hot pepper, and… (checks notes) a cup and a half of millet flour?  That’s pretty hearty, all right.

Zoom Koom ingredients. Not pictured – tamarind liquid.

We started by boiling whole tamarinds for a while to make tamarind liquid. We’ve used the paste before, but never the original fruits. They’re sticky and kind of a pain to work with, but the results are delicious. You strain out the solids, and then just mix all this stuff together. The final drink was very, very thick, but quite refreshing and tasty.

Our main course consisted of two dishes – a fried black eyed pea fritter called “boussan touba”, and a goat and rice stew.  For the fritters, we soaked and then boiled black eyed peas, mixed them with carrot and onion, and then fried them in peanut oil.  The recipe only called for one egg and no water as a binder, but they pretty much disintegrated like that, so we added some more water to get them to hold their shape.  Next time I might try another egg instead.

The main course was a basic stew – goat, carrot, cabbage, and onion simmered together for a long time, with the rice added at the end to cook in the liquid.  The new ingredient to us for this one was Carolina Gold rice, which is apparently significantly closer to the varietal found in West Africa than your basic supermarket long grain.  We ordered that on the internet, and it was definitely different – chewier and more flavorful, for sure.

Here’s some “in process” photos:

Upper right: black eyed peas. Upper left: goat stew. Lower right: tamarinds.

Fritters Cooking

The fritters also allowed us to use up the peanut oil we had purchased for Belgium, which was (checks notes)… even longer than last time ago.

With everything cooked up, it was time to eat!

Overall, a very tasty meal!  The goat stew was flavorful and delicious, the pea fritters were crunchy on the outside and soft in the middle, and the Zoom Koom was probably the highlight – what’s not to like about pineapple, ginger, and tamarind? It was, however, so thick that we actually had trouble drinking it around the ice cubes.

The next day, I made a peanut lime sauce to eat with the rest of the fritters.  Not authentic, but very tasty.

So Burkina Faso – we appreciate you!  Three dishes all suitable for preparation on a weeknight, and tasty leftovers for several days.  Next up, another African country – we finish up the “B”s with Burundi, and our first attempt at a meal that is both vegan and gluten free.  And not only free of vegans, but also safe for them to eat!

Recipes here:
Cooked Earth blog – Burkina Faso

We’re back in eastern Europe, which means it was time to once again consult my friend Walt.  He was a big help with Bosnia, and Croatia is on the horizon, so I’m sure we’ll be hearing from him again. (If you haven’t checked out his band’s page yet, you should!)

So, Bulgaria.  I had found a recipe or two, but Walt sold us on trying to put together a fairly substantial meal, consisting of a soup, two salads, bread, a main dish, and dessert.  The clock had also been started ticking by the fact that we found some Bulgarian style feta cheese at our local farmers’ market, and so had to use it while it was still fresh.

Bulgaria didn’t require a lot of exotic ingredients – no wacky chili peppers that take a month to arrive or cream that requires a drive to Detroit.  Lots of cucumbers, peppers, onions, and a pumpkin.  So without further ado, the dishes. (We didn’t take a lot of “in process” pictures this time.)

Clockwise from top, Shopska Salata, Tarator, and roasted peppers.

To start the meal off, we had what I’ve seen repeatedly described as Bulgaria’s national dish – Shopska Salata… which turns out to be a pretty darn conventional salad.  Tomatoes, cucumbers, raw onion, and the Bulgarian feta.  The feta is what really makes it distinctively Bulgarian – it’s smoother and creamier than Greek feta, and made a nice starter for the meal. But it’s certainly not something that felt exotic.

On the other hand, the soup certainly was a little outside of our normal range – it was a cold yogurt soup with cucumbers and walnuts called tarator.  But not just any yogurt – Bulgarian yogurt!  OK, fine, Bulgarian style yogurt.  The good news is that you can find it at Whole Foods, and that really is good news, because the stuff is very tasty – smoother and tarter than Greek yogurt, it made a great soup when balanced with the crunchiness of the walnuts and the mildness of the cucumbers.

To complete our opening course, we roasted some sweet peppers on the gas range.  Shoving food directly into the fire is fun, but I needed to be a bit more aggressive about it – the pictures I looked at after the fact showed peppers that had been much more fully incinerated than ours had, which explains why the skins didn’t peel off as well.  Still, roasted peppers dressed simply with vinegar and oil were a good complement to the soup.

On to the main course, Gyuvetch. Literally, the word just describes a type of pot. Which, of course, we don’t actually have.  After Walt suggested this would be a good choice of main dish, I spent a lot of time trying to chase down a recipe that a) didn’t use beef, which I was assured wasn’t really authentic, and b) had quantities and cooking times.

I completely failed at b).

So, instead, I found a recipe from a tiny little EU government grant, accompanied by a video of a Bulgarian grandma saying things like “now put it in the oven until it’s done.” So we winged it.

The recipe also didn’t call for any meat at all, so I borrowed some guidance on pork from Walt and another recipe and tossed that in.  The final product consists of veg and pork that is first simmered on the stove until tender, and then topped with an egg and yogurt custard and baked.  It’s not quite a pie, and not quite a stew, but it’s very, very good.  We also made a nice loaf of bread to go with, although it did disintegrate a bit on removal from the oven.

Gyuvetch and bread. (Structural integrity optional)

Finally – dessert.  This was actually the FIRST dish Walt said we had to make, and he wasn’t wrong.  Tikvenik is what you’d get if you crossed pumpkin pie with baklava – a sweet, nutty, pumpkin filling rolled up in phylo dough. Yummy. It was so good we forgot to take a picture until we were boxing up the leftovers.

Tikvenik. Presentation by Rubbermaid

We ALSO forgot to take a picture of our dinner guest, but Laurie was nice enough to come over and share the experience with us, and bring a lovely Pinot Noir to go with.  These meals are always better with friends!

Next up, we have a whole run of African countries, starting with Burkina Faso.

Recipes:

• • Shopska Salata
  • Tarator
  • Roasted Peppers: Put peppers directly in the gas flame until they turn black all over. Let them sit in a paper bag for 15-30 minutes.  Peel, slice, and dress. Done.
  • Pogacha Bread
  • Gyuvetch (We added 1 lb of browned pork tenderloin to this otherwise vegetarian (but dear lord, not even remotely vegan) recipe.) Bulgarian grandma video here.
  • Tikvenik

I was nervous about this one.

Unsurprisingly, I’m not the first person to have had the idea to cook my way through the alphabet.  I follow several other blogs dedicated to the same project.  The most thorough of these is Cooked Earth – a site whose author is MUCH more rigorous than we are.  He won’t substitute ingredients, he does months of research, and his presentation is amazing.  Of course, he also lives in New York, and thus has access to a LOT more ethnic grocery stores than we do.

His opening sentence for his entry on Brunei was “Guys. This one almost broke me.”  He goes on to uses phrases like “fermented Durian.”

Needless to say, this did not inspire confidence.

But on we went.  Brunei is a very small country, so finding dishes which were uniquely Bruneian and not regional was a challenge, but there is one dish that everyone agreed was the national dish – ambuyat.  Ambuyat is boiled sago palm starch.  It’s apparently like nachos, in that there’s not much flavor to be had in the thing itself, but it serves as a vehicle for condiments. (Which can include the aforementioned fermented durian, but dear god, no.)

So, ambuyat it was, with a pair of dips.  In addition, I found a recipe for buttermilk chicken (which does not involve any buttermilk at all) which was described as the recipe that Bruneian college students abroad write home to ask their mothers to send them.

One thing that several sites made clear that sago is NOT the same thing as tapioca, so if we wanted the authentic experience, we needed to get sago, not tapioca.

I have no idea.

But we took the sago pearls and ground them up as fine as my battered old spice grinder would get them.  Meanwhile, Leigh was frying chicken:

We don’t do a lot of deep frying, but this seemed to work out OK.  We still had some peanut oil left over from Belgium, which was (checks notes)… oh dear ago.

Next, we assembled our two sambals. The first was a mango sambal which would traditionally have used a local variant, but we were assured was fine with any old mango we could find.  We mixed it with shallots, chiles, and garlic, for a very unfamiliar mix of flavors:

Colorful though, innit?

The other sambal involved shrimp paste, chiles, and calamansi lime juice. (An asian lime juice which is intensely sweetened.  This stuff is GREAT with tonic water – I recommend getting some if you can find it.) The intensly fishy, salty shrimp, combined with the hot chiles and sweet lime juice resulted a flavor which is probably one of the most… foreign to our palates so far in our trip.  It wasn’t bad, but it definitely had notes that my brain wasn’t used to processing as “this is food.”

Meanwhile, we finished the chicken and made the sauce. “Buttermilk Chicken” apparently actually means “Chicken with Butter and Milk.”  But that’s OK – we LIKE butter and milk.

Also chiles.  Because of course chiles.  Curry leaves as well, which is an ingredient I use all the time for Indian cooking.

Finally it was time to make the ambuyat, by pouring boiling water over the ground sago starch, and bring the whole thing to the table.

Clockwise from upper right: Buttermilk chicken, ambuyat, sambal belacan, sambal cacah, bog standard basmati rice.  (I don’t even know if basmati rice is reasonable for Brunei, but I had forgotten to soak the sticky rice that would probably have been more appropriate.)

The ambuat was.. fine.  The texture was a bit less smooth than it probably should have been but it reminded me of nothing so much as slightly stickier grits.  Dipped in the sauces, it provided a perfectly acceptable medium for moving sauce to our faces.

The buttermilk chicken, on the other hand, was delicious.  Would definitely eat again, if deep frying weren’t such a major pain.

So there you are – we survived Brunei, and it was much less terrifying than I thought it would be. Next time we’re back to Europe for Bulgaria.

Recipes:

• Buttermilk Chicken
• Ambuyat, Sambal Belacan
• Sambal cacah – From a friend of a friend: “Mangos, Garlic, Chiles, and Shallots.”

We had been putting off Botswana, because everything I had read indicated that the national dish was extremely simple. Beef, water, salt.  Concerned that it might be a bit boring, I just hadn’t gotten around to making it.

And I was totally wrong.  This was definitely one of the simplest meals we’ve made, but was very tasty.  Complete ingredient list for all three dishes:

• Beef
• Water
• Salt
• Corn Meal
• Spinach
• Broth

And that’s it. You buy cheap beef, boil it for a few hours, then pound it down into individual muscle fibers. Throw it back in the drained pot to brown a bit, and you’re done.

It’s served with boiled cornmeal, which is basically grits. Fully traditional would have been amaranth greens as an accompaniment, but spinach was simple and tasty.

And there you are – simple, tasty, and filling. Nice job, Botswana!  Next up, Brazil!

Recipes:
Beef: Cooked Earth
Pap (Corn Meal Mush): Global Table Adventure
Spinach: OK seriously, you boil it in salted water for two minutes, then eat it.

I’ve been posting about our international food adventures on Facebook, but I’m going to start moving them here, because it’s easier to integrate pictures into the story, and we don’t actually go on vacation that much.  I’ll probably also start retroactively moving the prior meals on here too, which means this explanation will be in the middle of the narrative, and that will be confusing too.

But without further ado – Bosnia and Herzegovina!  I have an old friend who is a professional eastern European musician, so I contacted him for suggestions. Being that sort of person, he opened another chat window to the mayor of Hamtramck, just to make sure he had the right places to send me. (Follow that link, by the way. They’re really good.)

He nailed it, too – I walked into a nondescript grocery store and asked for Kajmak and the dude behind the counter enthusiastically told me “You can have this kind, which comes right from Bosnia, or THIS kind, which my grandmother made this morning.”

Naturally, I went with the grandma Kajmak.

But what IS Kajmak, you ask?  Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

The centerpiece of this meal was going to be cevapi, which should have a bunch more diacriticals on it, and comes from the same root word as “kebab.”  It’s an uncased beef and lamb sausage that has a very distinctive “springy” texture that you get from grinding the meat several times, and mixing in baking soda.

I had never used a meat grinder before, but fortunately our friends who were coming for dinner were able to loan us one. Meat ground, we tossed in parsley, garlic, and a packet of cevapi seasoning mix that was also provided by the Balkan grocery store. Into the fridge with the meat.

Cevapi is traditionally eaten on a fluffy flatbread called Lepinja – like pita but softer and airier. I came home early from work on the day we were having dinner so I could get the dough started.  The other accompaniments are ajvar, a roasted red pepper spread with eggplant, and kajmak.

Oh right, kajmak.  So kajmak is essentially clotted cream.  You can make it yourself, but it takes a while, so I went with the grandma version. It’s made by simmering milk and heavy cream forever and then skimming off the heart attack that forms on top.  It’s incredibly sweet and rich.

Our friends arrived, so we put on some Bosnian music, and put them to work making sausages, which we tossed onto the oven plate at the same time as we put the bread in the oven.

The bread really did turn out amazingly well for a first attempt.

Once the sausages were done (and the one smoke alarm I missed hurriedly disabled), it was time to feast! To cut the richness of the kajmak, ajvar, and cevapi, we added some raw onion, and served it all up with some Croatian beer brought by our friends.

For dessert, we made what my friend Walt described as “the only Bosnian dessert that isn’t  a variation of Baklava”, namely Tufahije – apples stuffed with honey and walnuts.  Apparently grandmas will actually come to blows over whether they should be made with sweet or sour apples.  We went with sour, and they were fantastic, especially because everything is better eaten with friends.

Next up, Botswana!

Recipes:
Cevapi, Ajvar, and Lepinja
Tufahije
Kajmak – ask grandma