Mauritania is a west African country bordered to the south by Senegal and to the north by…

(checks notes)

You know what, never mind.

It is presently in a period of democrac-ish, which is good, but still has an uncomfortable amount of slavery, which is very, very bad..

Let’s just get to the food, shall we?

We struggled to find a dish that wasn’t more identified with either Morocco or Senegal, and we eventually settled on Leksour, which is a lamb stew served over millet flour pancakes.

Rather than buy millet flour, I used our spice grinder to make it from some millet we had left over from a previous recipe.  (I’m NOT going to back and try to identify which one, because then I’ll have to admit how long that millet has been in the cupboard.)

The flours are mixed together with water and a bit of salt, and that batter rests for a bit as you get to work on the stew.  Which, to be fair, is pretty straightforward.  Brown some stewing lamb.

Chop up some vegetables and toss them in with salt, pepper and a bay leaf.

Then stew for an hour.

The pancakes were interesting – the dough was substantially stiffer than normal pancake batter, but given that the ratios for flour to water I found online were all over the map, I’m not sure if it was supposed to be or not.  None of them seemed to either burn, or be too undercooked, at any rate.  I think they may have been a little under, but it’s hard to say – there’s also a variety of colors of the millet itself out there to choose from.

And once the pancakes are ready, you just put the stew on the pancakes and eat it.

And it was fine.  There’s nothing wrong with a basic lamb stew, and the flatbread was good to soak up the juices.  But it was also… pretty basic.  The research for African countries is frequently difficult, as we’ve discussed earlier, and I’m sure there’s more interesting things that could be done with this if we had a better sense of what the normal range was.

But as it was, we had a nice Thursday night dinner and leftovers for several days.

Next up, we’re off to a country whose name could easily be mistaken for Mauritania, but isn’t.

Recipe:
Leksour (Mauritanian-style Pancakes with Sauce)