I feel a little bad about this one.

There’s a dish that’s mentioned on a lot of sites as the national dish of Mali, which is a stew called Tiguadege Na.  I found a recipe with a reasonably promising looking source.

But – I feel like we just didn’t quite DO enough.

Also, it’s remarkably similar to the dishes we made for Chad, the Gambia, and the Central African Republic, so I wonder if we should have tried harder to find something a bit more unique?  There’s lots of reasons why the African countries are frequently challenging, and also somewhat problematic, which I talk about a bit on the CAR page.

So anyway, Mali.  Fascinating country with a lot of really interesting history.  Timbuktu is in Mali.  You can learn more about that in this video. 

All that said, here’s the dish.

Brown some meat, then add onions and garlic until they’ve softened.  Our local Save On Foods had some wildly varying sizes of stew meat on offer, but since we were going to braise it forever, it didn’t really matter.

Add tomatoes, broth, peanut butter, and Herbes de Province. I’m assuming the latter is due to the fact that France was the colonial aggressor in this part of Africa.

Finally, toss in carrots and potatoes and stew forever.

It ended up being tasty, but much more watery than in the recipe photos.  If you try this one, I might consider doubling the peanut butter at least.

And that’s Mali.  They can’t all be huge production numbers, I suppose.  Next up, Malta!

Recipe:
Tiguadege Na