International Meals – Liberia

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:

Sweet Potato Greens
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:

Beef, shrimp, and chicken

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.

Meat cooking
OK, all the meat’s cooked – now what?

The recipe has a set of prepration 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.

Greens cooking

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!

Cooked greens and meat

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.

Jute leaves

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.

Check rice.

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!

Liberian meal
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.

Liberian stew over rice

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

Liberian Stew in a burrito

3. Mixed into a cream cheese and mozzella 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!

Liberian cheese dip

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

Recipes:
Sweet Potato Greens
Check Rice

International Meals – Lesotho

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.

Uncooked brisket

Cooked brisket
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.
Beef cooking with onions
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.

Chard and potatoes

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. Carrot, tomato, and onion stew

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?

Jello and custard

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.