In My Kitchen: Make Your Own Suya

A couple of weeks back, Mr E was having crazing for Suya and we were about to make a journey into London to go and find some. I asked for some feedback on a place I had heard about {Facebook is great for this} and the general consensus was that it wasn't all that great.

For the people who had tried Suya in Nigeria {us included} they really didn't rate the place, so rather than us go all the way to the place and be disappointed, I decided to find a recipe to adapt and figure this thing out. Surely it can't be that hard!!!

The great thing is for those of you who would like to make your own Suya, it is so easy to do.

Below I have put down the steps I used and it turned out really good.

Ingredients:

Meat {preferably beef}. I used beef strips which I normally use for stir fry. They were already pre-cut into the right size. You can use any

For the marinade:

• 3 teaspoons of finely ground roasted peanuts {I was surprised about this but it is an essential ingredient unless you're allergic to peanuts! I used ground nut we brought back from Nigeria.}

• 2 teaspoons cayenne pepper or red pepper, or red pepper flakes

• 1 teaspoon paprika

• 1 teaspoon salt

• ½ teaspoon garlic powder

• ½ teaspoon black pepper*

• ½ teaspoon jerk seasoning*

• 1 teaspoon chilli power*

*my personal preference – you do not need to include.

Above is the ratio of spices I used. I had to make some more as it wasn't enough to coat all the meat I had and you need some of the spices left to sprinkle on the Suya once its cooked.

Steps:

1. Grind the peanuts. You can use a rolling pin or food processor. Try not to grind it too much other wise you will end up with a peanut paste which is not what you want. If you find the peanut to be too oily, place between kitchen towel paper to absorb the excess oil.

2. Mix in the other spices with the peanut powder.

3. Take your meat and dip and roll in the peanut-spice mix, making sure the meat is completely coated.

4. Allow meat to marinate for thirty minutes or more.

5. At this stage depending on the size of the meat you can place them on skewers. I didn't have any so just cooked the meat on an oven tray at 400 degrees for 20-30 mins. Remember to pre-heat the oven. You can also cook the meat on a barbeque if you prefer.

6. Once cooked, chop one onion {red is better} and sprinkle on top.

7. Serve and Enjoy!

Have a go and feel free to add other spices that you like to tailor the taste. {If you want it more spicy add more cayenne pepper, less so substitute with paprika.}

Let me know how you get on!

Learning To Love My Kitchen

My mum came to visit us the weekend and it was wonderful.

I haven't spent time with my mum properly in a long time and it was nice to talk and catch up. She gave myself and Mr E lots of great advice about marriage, communication and dealing with conflict and we were so blessed to have her with us.

On Saturday we spent a bit of time in the kitchen where she showed my how to make moin moin and ogbono soup! She also talked me through other meals and preparation of meat and fish {which freaks me out!}. We have been eating very since she left!

I'm pleased to be able to add two more dishes {actually make that three if you include the Suya I made last weekend} to my list of meals I can cook. It's funny because if I met up with the Chichi of 18 months ago, she certainly wouldn't be loving the kitchen as much as I do now. I especially love baking and managed to also squeeze out a cake on Saturday as well.

 

 

Yummy Suya!

I have noticed my relationship with my kitchen has grown a lot over the past few months. I'm always on the look out for good recipes whether in magazines or online so I can add variety to our meal times and I genuinely enjoy cooking.

Kemi posted a fantastic recipe for Jamaican Curry Goat which I will be trying out very soon and I had this Potato Gratin at my friend Moyo's house and it was AMAZING.

Where do you find your recipes from and do you enjoy spending time in the kitchen?

In My Kitchen: Chin Chin

So last night we decided to open a couple of our wedding presents and whip up a Nigerian delicacy.

Mr E and I were craving chin chin and having made numerous trips to our local African store spending lots of cash there this past two weeks, I decided to scour the internet to find a recipe I could make for us both.

I love my chin chin and especially like it hard and crunchy. The recipe I found was very easy to follow.

• 2 cups flour
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 egg
• 1/4 cup milk
• 1/4 cup butter, softened
• vegetable oil
• confectioners' sugar

Normally when I find a recipe in US format I have to convert to Metric but our Joseph Joseph Nest 8 did it for me. It had lots of measuring cups 1/2 cup right down to 1/4 and it made it so easy for me to measure everything out. {One of my favourite wedding gifts!}

The whole thing took about 2 hours to make, include prep and frying and they definitely turned out crunchy but not as hard as I would have personally liked.

• Combine flour, sugar, and baking powder in medium bowl.
• Stir in egg and milk until mixture is crumbly.
• With hands, work in butter until well blended.
• Let stand at room temperature for 30 minutes.

• In heavy skillet over medium heat, heat 1 inch of oil to 365 degrees F. {I used a deep fryer for this step}
• On lightly floured board with floured rolling pin, roll out half of dough to 1/16 inch thickness.

With pastry cutter or sharp knife, cut dough into strips, then squares

 

Repeat with remaining dough until gone.

Fry a few pieces at a time in hot oil until golden; drain on paper towels; cool.

Voila!

 

My husband’s verdict? First class!

Love rush

How cute are these love dishes! Perfect for entertaining or for a romantic evening for two?

Can be ordered from Angelic Weddings.

In My Kitchen: Egusi Soup

Finally my Egusi soup is yellow!

Now to some this might seem like a bit of strange statement to make but I know how to make Egusi soup, or at least I thought I did. However today was my 4th attempt and it actually looked {and tasted} like how my mum makes it!

I think the main issue has been using the wrong ingredients, as up until now I have been making it without Palm Oil. Now I’ve never been a fan of palm oil and neither is my mum, hence why I have never made soup with it. {Mum makes her own version of palm oil!}. The thing about palm oil, is that if you get a poor quality brand it can really affect the taste of the food and also leave quite a nasty waxy after taste. So up until now I have avoided even purchasing it, as I wasn’t even sure what sort to buy.

In its place I have substituted chopped tomato in oil, tomato puree in oil. But each time whilst the taste isn’t bad per se, it looked very red and tasted very tomato-like. In my naivety I thought the yellow colour you see above was down to the egusi, when in fact it’s the palm oil. On one occasion I wasted an awful lot of egusi trying to make my chopped tomato/puree concoction yellow!

Over the new year holiday I was introduced to a brand of Palm Oil by my Aunt.

Entering Golden Sun Nigerian Palm Oil…

I used this today and the results are as above! Really pleased with the texture and consistency of the oil as well as how the soup turned out and tasted.

For those who wish to recreate the delicious Egusi Soup, I have included a recipe below. Please note that my recipe is approximated as I don’t ever measure what I use {except the very first time} and make every soup from sight and taste – your mother will tell you the same! But it should give you an idea.

Ingredients used:

• Large pieces of Meat/Chicken
• 1 onion
• 2 Garlic gloves
• 4 maggie cubes
• 25g Crayfish ground
• 50g Egusi ground
• 100ml water
• 125ml palm oil
• Spinach - chopped

1. In a pot boil the meat {mutton, beef, chicken} until slightly tender. Spice with a little salt.

2. In a blender, mix together with the water the onion, garlic, maggie cubes, crayfish and egusi. My egusi and crayfish were already ground, but I preferred to mix it all in with the other ingredients.

3. In a separate pot heat around 125ml of palm oil. Add to it the mixture from step 2 and keep stirring. At this point you will start to see the mixture turn from the red/orange palm oil colour, to a more yellow colour.

4. Pour in the almost cooked meat, along with the water that it was cooking in {nice stock!} and add any extra spices. I added pepper, thyme, chilli powder and salt. What spices you include is really your own personal taste.

5. Leave to cook for around 20 mins or so, adding water if you feel it is too thick. The overall consistency shouldn’t be too watery.

5. Add spinach and leave to simmer for a final 5-10 mins. You don’t want to overcook the spinach otherwise it loses all its goodness.

6. Serve with Pounded Yam, Semolina, Gari

Yummy!

If you have any tips or methods to improve this recipe, please let me know in comments. Happy to try and feed back.

In my kitchen: Banana Cake

How you can go from this:

to this:

Let’s just say this was the most amazing cake I have ever made. Didn’t realise bananas in cake could be so yummy!

This is a great way to use over ripe bananas which you don’t want to eat, but don’t want to waste.

Ingredients
4oz butter or margarine
6oz sugar (granulated, caster, or mix in some demerara, whatever you have to hand)
8oz self raising flour
2 eggs
2 large or 3 medium, very ripe bananas

Instructions

1. Heat the oven to gas mark 4; 180C
2. Grease a 2lb loaf tin*
3. Mash the bananas with a sturdy fork.
4. Cream the butter and sugar together and mix in the eggs
5. Mix together the two yellow sludges you now have.
6. Mix in the flour.
7. Scrape into the loaf tin and bake for 40 minutes then lower the temperature to gas mark 2; 150C and cook for a further 30 minutes.
8. Try to let it cool (turned out on a rack) before you devour it.

* I split my cake mixture between a loaf tin and an ordinary cake tin, as I thought it would be too much for the loaf tin. I needn’t have worried as all it would have done, was create a bigger cake. Next time I will put all in one tin.
Recipe kindly borrowed from here.

In my kitchen: Flapjack

After my lovely roast chicken dinner last weekend,  I was craving something sweet. As I had run out of eggs, I wasn’t able to bake a cake. So I had a look in the cupboard to see what I could make with the ingredients I did have: sugar, syrup, butter and oats.

Enter a childhood favourite…flapjack. {To my American readers, this is very similar to a granola bar but a much softer and moist, without any of the fruit and nut}.

Now you wouldn’t believe how difficult it was trying to find a decent recipe for flapjack online. After scouring various sites I settled on the recipe below.

Ingredients:

Chopped rolled (cheap porridge) oats 125g

Rolled (premium porridge) oats 125g

Margarine or butter 150g

Golden syrup 75g or 4 tablespoons

Sugar 75g (ideally brown sugar)

Instructions:

1. Put the 150g of margarine, 75g of sugar & 75g of golden syrup in saucepan and heat until it is all liquid.
2. Meanwhile line the baking tin with greaseproof paper.
3. Mix all the oats into the liquid.
4. Put the mixture into the baking tin & press flat.
5. Bake at 175 °C (Gas Mark 4) for 25 to 30 minutes. Warning: the timing is tolerant but accuracy in temperature is critical.
6. Slice into squares before it sets but leave in place in tin.
7. Leave to cool and set.

Now these flapjacks came out soft and I actually prefer them more crunchy, so my brother (who is a chef extraordinaire) has advised that next time, I cook them for longer time at a higher heat.

You can make many variations to the traditional recipe – add chocolate chips, coat with chocolate on top, you name it, you can do it. As it is such a simple recipe, you can’t really go wrong.

With a cold glass of milk – yummy! Takes me right back to my youth! :)

In my kitchen: Spicy Roast Chicken

So yesterday I cooked half a roast chicken on my own. Now it might not sound like much, but I'm usually afraid of any piece of chicken bigger than a thigh, as I don’t really know how to handle it, yet alone attempt to cook it.

But I thought this weekend, I would give it a go. Saturdays are my experimental days and I figured that sometime in the near future Christmas dinner will fall to me and it would be good to get in some practice! I did a quick search on Google to get some ideas on techniques and basic steps and off I went.

I washed, I spiced and I roasted and Voila! An hour and a half later, Mr E and I were tucking into spicy roast chicken, with roast potatoes and vegetables – yummy!

I forgot to take a picture, which I’m slighted gutted about, as it did look rather nice {the picture above is from Google}, so instead I thought I’d share some helpful tips I learnt along the way.

Cooking tips:

• Temperature should be around 190 degrees, gas mark 5 to allow it to cook evenly. Last thing you want is burnt skin and raw insides!
• If you like tasty chicken, create your own marinade and let it sit in it for a while. If you have time, overnight in the fridge is good but I did it for 20 mins and it was fine. My marinade is a mixture of ketchup {yes!}, jerk seasoning, chicken seasoning, paprika, chilli powder, Knorr cubes, Garam masala and thyme. I then sprinkle Cajun seasoning just before I pop it in the oven. If you like your chicken mild, simple salt and pepper should suffice.
• During cooking you should ‘baste’ the chicken at least 3 times., every 20/25 mins or so. Now I didn’t have a clue what this meant, but after a quick Google search I discovered all it means is to take the chicken out of the oven and pour the chicken juice created through the roasting, over it and put back in the oven. Not sure what this is supposed to do, but I think it might help the chicken stay nice and moist.
• In the last 10 mins turn the heat up really high so that outside gets extra crispy.
• If you want nice crispy potatoes, boil the potatoes for 10-15 mins, then place in roasting dish, cover with some of the chicken juice and let it roast for around 30-40 mins

Overall the meal was delicious and I will definitely be attempting it again with a full chicken!

Delia eat your heart out!

I have tasked myself with learning a new dish every month on my journey to becoming more domestic (read: wife like). There is no better accomplishment than making a really tasty meal from scratch and I’m really enjoying it.

September I learnt how to make Bombay potatoes, October was Fried Rice and November is Beans with plantain. Between recipes online and my mum on the end of the phone, I haven’t faired too badly!

In addition for this month, I also decided to make a cake as well as some cupcakes!

Here are the results! P.S. They all passed the taste test, I’m pleased to say!

Beans (made from Black eyed beans)  - served with rice and stew and plantain

The dark bit to the top right is the bottom of the pot (slightly burnt!). It was enjoyed so much that that was all that was left when I came to take the picture.

Sponge Cake

Look how lovely and moist it turned out! Really impressed. One thing I noticed was how sweet it was, so I will be reducing the amount of sugar used next time.

Cupcakes

These babies looked better pre-iced! - my icing skills are a lot to be desired! I made it up okay, but applying the icing to the cakes was a different matter. Definitely need some more practice.

Will be learning in coming months:

• Yam Porridge
• Carrot Cake
• Moi moi
• Egusi Soup (have made it once, but will be doing it again)
• Ogbono soup
• Pepper soup
• Lasagne
• Brownies
• Chicken Biriyani
• Curry from scratch (not a Patak’s jar!)
• Quiche
• Apple crumble
• Chocolate cake
• Flapjack
• Cheesecake {yummy!}
• Dhal

Some of the above are Nigerian staples, which once mastered can make a meal for a few days.

I’m also keen to learn any good dinner dishes from other cultures so, if you have a good recipe you would like me to try, let me know!