Main dish – Foodian For Life

February 19, 2021

Even more random photos – Ghanaian food edition!

Ei, this “clearing my phone of random photos” thing that I started long ago, I’m still at it. Sorry for occasional visitors of this blog. It’s not that I don’t eat oo, it’s not that I don’t cook oo, it’s just that I’m often too lazy to post the results here. You have to put the recipe steps and photos in the proper order, write everything in an understandable way, post it, then come back again and post some more, etc. My hat is off to consistent food bloggers. It is NOT easy.

In contrast, just posting random photos of food is something anyone can do. Even me, haha. So here are some more photos of food I ate/people sent to me. Let me clear them all and make space for proper things. And I will post some actual recipes one of these days. I made some very good spicy cucumber pickles the other day, for example.

Enough about that. On with the random photos.

Fufu. It’s those two round balls over there, a sticky mess of pounded yam/plantain/cassava/cocoyam. A Ghanaian staple dish I’ve never really liked, but my house people loooove the stuff. Based on the plate, this picture came from my brother, I think? On the left side is some light soup to dip the fufu in. Floating on top is some pepper, fish, okro, garden eggs… all things I don’t like. Hard pass on this one.

Kenkey and sardine and pepper. Now you’re talking my language. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned before that this used to be one of my favorite “Go to” dishes when I didn’t feel like cooking/eating what was cooked. Even now I still eat it once or twice a week, despite the inevitable heartburn.

You know as kids, we were given only a single sardine from the tin and we had to make it last for the whole ball of kenkey, it was crazy. Now I’d prefer to eat two/three sardines and save the rest for a sandwich, but whenever I do that someone always steals my sardine from the fridge. So I just eat the whole tin like the bourgeois pig that I am.

Definitely not my picture! Someone’s dressed-up, fancy frou-frou version of kenkey, pepper sauce and sausages. Not gonna lie, it looks great. Like something you’d serve to your in-laws to let them know that you’ve been to school some. 😀 Or something a fancy Ghanaian restaurant would serve. The photo looks a bit touched up in Photoshop, but still a very appealing meal. Please leave a comment if you know the source.

Fante kenkey with pig trotter stew, a.k.a nane fɔlɔ. One of my mother’s favorite stew. The pig trotters tend to be heavily salted, while some variants of fante kenkey contain no salt at all (Ga kenkey is pretty salty as well). Put the two together and you get the faint sweet-and-sourness of the fante kenkey matching well with the spicy, salty trotter stew. Truly a match made in heaven.

Could have sworn I’d posted this before, but this is otor (otɔ), a festive food Ga people eat on their birthdays. Not strictly on the calendar birthday but on the weekday closest to their calendar birthday. E.g. if you were born on Wednesday March 10th, you would eat your otor on the first Wednesday after March 10th. People don’t adhere to it that strictly though.

The dish is just a simple blend of boiled yam, red palm oil, salt and onions. Boiled egg is definitely not optional! As far as I know, nobody just eats otor for fun, even though it’s tasty and filling. Somehow the “birthday food” idea is too deeply ingrained in our heads.

Now for a change of pace, something sweet. This must have come from my brother as well, because I haven’t eaten these in a while. If I’m not mistaken, they’re called “monkey’s tails” a.k.a. adun le in Ga. They’re a sweet crunchy snack, but I have zero idea what goes into them. I used to eat them as a kid in La, but I haven’t had any in decades. These look very pale though, maybe underfried?

Another favorite snack of Ghanaian kids: yoryi! (yɔɔyi in Ga). Apparently its English name is “velvet tamarind” or something crazy like that, I dunno. Wiki says it’s called Dialium cochinchinense and is currently endangered, which is sad to hear. We used to love them as kids, and they’re in season right now so I expect to see them in the marketplaces. Especially now that there’s a fad going around claiming it has all kinds of health benefits. Ghanaians and their health fads. Yoryi is just yoryi, eat it quietly and be happy!

July 3, 2019July 3, 2019

Taiwanese Three Cup Chicken recipe (not exactly authentic)

Actually it’s a bit hard to define “authentic” when it comes to Chinese food, because they have the same principle as Africans when it comes to cooking: just put everything in and adjust to taste. None of this measuring left and right stuff. The theory is that Taiwanese Three Cup Chicken is called “Three Cup” because it takes a cup each of rice wine, soy sauce, and sesame oil, but in practice how much to add of each is up to you.

The recipe I sort-of followed, sort-of was inspired by is Bob’s Your Uncle’s version:

Bob’s Your Uncle is a Cantonese cooking channel I used to watch to listen to Cantonese and learn simple recipes. Content warning: he’s a bit vulgar in some of his videos. I say “used to watch” because for the past year or two he’s just been posting cruise ship reviews and travel videos, which aren’t really my thing. But his older videos are good for a watch and most of the food looks easy to make.

Enough with the intro, let’s get down to cooking! Except… it’s been over a year since I made this recipe, so I’ve forgotten all the precise proportions I used. Wait, I shouldn’t lie. I didn’t use any proportions. I just used whatever I had in the house:

For example, most recipes call for Thai basil or any other basil, but I don’t have any basil so… I substituted our local herb known as “kowɛ.” It’s a variety of mint but hey, it’s green and it’s leafy just like basil so… yeah. Also I only had a sprig instead of the massive quantities used in the recipe so that’s another change. In the video Bob also finished up by cooking everything in a clay pot, but I don’t have a clay pot so my little skillet had to do. African cooking man, just throw it all in.

Ingredients I used: Chicken thighs, soy sauce, mint (kowɛ), oyster sauce, onions, ginger, garlic, pepper, sesame oil, rice wine, green onions (I happened to have some on hand so why not?), jerk sauce (ditto), a little mirin (ditto). BTW you can find all the stranger ingredients like oyster sauce and sesame oil at a Chinese grocery store like Great Wall Supermarket at Danquah Circle or Jiahua Agricultural somewhere in Osu, I forget where.

Process: I marinated the chicken thighs in a bit of soy sauce and oyster sauce for about an hour before cooking.

Brown the chicken in a little oil (if you marinate it like I did, it will already be brown, but fry it up for extra flavor anyway)
Take out the chicken and set it aside on a plate
Add sesame oil to the pan and fry the sliced ginger and garlic gloves for a minute or two, until fragrant
Add the sliced onions and fry briefly, then add all the chicken back in.

5. Time to season to taste with the extra soy sauce, oyster sauce, jerk sauce, mirin (many recipes call for rock sugar, but mirin is a sweet Japanese condiment so it’ll do), rice wine (optional IMO if you can’t take alcohol) the leftover marinade, anything else you can throw in.

6. Once you’re happy with the taste, toss in the fresh herbs like kowɛ and stir them in, then lower the heat, cover the pan and cook it for 10-15 minutes until the chicken is cooked through. You can add a tiny bit of stock or water if it’s too dry, especially if you skip the rice wine.

7. Taste, adjust final seasoning and serve on a bed of hot, freshly-cooked rice.

It’s really easy to make, TBH with minimal chopping as long as you have the ingredients already on hand.

The only draw back is that the color is a bit dark, so for extra attractiveness serve some greens or salad on the side. I haven’t tried this with substitutes like beef, pork or tofu, but the basic seasoning should work with any other protein. Give it a try and enjoy!

December 18, 2018

Random breakfast photo (tea bread and salad)

I don’t even remember making this one, so maybe I was just hanging around and someone called me to eat breakfast and this is what was available. That salad, especially. A lazy person like me wouldn’t have time to make a salad like that. And the tea bread doesn’t look too fresh – you can tell by the way the ends broke off instead of pulling out all stringy like with fresh bread. Ei. Beggar with a choice. I’m sure this breakfast was delicious with some hot tea (tea-tea, not milo-tea) with not too much milk. Ah, I wish I could have it again.

Enough reminiscing. Next time I’ll have a recipe for Taiwanese Three Cup Chicken!

November 8, 2018

Kenkey and stew, one of my favorites

I may have mentioned it before, but don’t expect to see much Ghanaian food on this blog. Not because I don’t eat or like it but precisely the opposite – it’s so common in my life that I don’t feel the need to blog about it. It’s also so common in my house that I almost never have to cook it.

This kenkey and meat stew combo used to be one of my go-to meals whenever I couldn’t think of anything to eat. I LOVE KENKEY. But I say “used to” because I went through a period – right about this time last year, come to think of it – where it gave me severe heartburn, so I’ve been cutting down on the kenkey ever since. But banku is such a poor substitute – it has its moments but good kenkey is hard to beat. I’ll be reintroducing kenkey cautiously so this old photo is in commemoration of that.

September 14, 2018

Rice and chicken… stew? Soup?

It’s been almost a year since I last posted. I was ill around the end of the year and completely lost my appetite. After that I’ve just been too lazy. Especially lazy to write full posts with recipes and explanations about the various things I’ve been cooking. But that ends today… uh, maybe.

Today’s post is just an old picture I found on my phone SD card. Rice I know and chicken I recognize, but what is the rest of that grey stuff? The reason I posted it is a cautionary tale about buying frozen vegetables in Ghana. Apart from peas and maybe broccoli, I’d say don’t bother. You’ll only get mushy, weird-tasting stuff because the supermarkets don’t take good care of their frozen stuff all the way along the supply chain. It will thaw out and refreeze at some point, as anyone who has ever bought grainy ice cream will testify.

So this awam chicken… stew? Not only looked unappetizing but it also tasted very average, thoroughly unimpressive. Better to buy fresh vegetables if you can afford them, or canned if you want to use preserved. Even Ghana supermarkets can’t mess those up. A word to the wise is enough.

I really need a better camera, but I’m not going to make that an excuse for not posting.

December 6, 2017

Ampesi and abom – An unconventional breakfast

I call it unconventional, but maybe ampesi (boiled yam, cocoyam or unripe plantain) and abom (fresh cocoyam leaf stew) is a common breakfast in rural areas of Ghana, but in Accra we fancy ourselves modern so it’s all oats and rice water and bread and tea. But this is the real stuff, food that can take you from 6am to 6pm on a single plate. This is the good stuff.

My favorite part of abom is the sliced onions in there, the more onions the better. I used to hate raw onions as a child – and actually I only started eating abom recently – but now I don’t mind them in dishes. Or with red pepper. Or in a salad. It’s even better when they’re cooked though, but just a little bit so they still have the shape and the crunch

When it comes to ampesi, I’m not very picky. But if I had to rank the various options in terms of preference it would be new yam > unripe plantain > cocoyam >>> ripe plantain >> sweet potato >>>> old yam. I haven’t had cassava ampesi before but I imagine it must be good too.

November 17, 2017October 30, 2018

What’s a Korean breakfast like?

I watched a Korean drama where the heroine made breakfast twice for her totally-not-love-interest. You know, the guy she’s going to be head over heels over by episode 10. These scenes were obviously shoehorned in so they could advertise their sponsor’s dinner (looks like Ikea?) but they meals still looked pretty delicious so I took screenshots.

I can’t figure most of the stuff out, though. The internet tells me all the little dishes are known as banchan, i.e. side dishes, but there are hundreds of side dishes in Korea. Anyway, I’m uploading them here for now and will update with the proper names of the food as and when I figure them out.

Here’s the first breakfast:

Some kind of vegetable salad in involving korean cucumbers (muchim)
Gamja jorim (potatoes cooked with soy sauce)
?
Green tea
Miyeok guk (seaweed soup)
Sookju namul (stir fried bean sprouts)
Steamed white rice
Gaeran mari (Rolled omelette)
Mashed sweet potatoes
Pickled lotus root and vegetables

And there’s the second.

?
Musaengchae (shredded daikon salad)?
? Possibly seasoned seaweed
Some kind of soup, possibly bukeoguk (dried pollock soup)
Fried eggs sunny side up
?
Steamed white rice
Some kind of salad?
Tofu? or Eomuk (fish cake)
Gaji namul? (stir-fried eggplant)
Braised/stewed fish in a spicy-looking sauce

Some of this stuff looks pretty good (especially the soups) so I might try a few here and there as I get the recipes. Look forward to it!

November 6, 2017

Chicken and bell pepper stir fry!

A stir fry is the easiest of the easiest dishes to make when you’re hungry and lazy. Chop up some veggies, chop up some meat, stir them all in a pan until they’re reasonably cooked, enjoy with plain rice or noodles! This chicken stir fry is something I made a lot when I was a student, not so much nowadays. Because it’s such a flexible recipe I’m not going to bother with amounts, just use whatever veggies and meat you have on hand in whatever quantities you want.

Ingredients for chicken and bell pepper stir fry

Chicken breast or thigh, boneless, sliced into thin strips
Bell peppers (a.k.a sweet pepper/green pepper), sliced into thin strips
Onions, thinly sliced
Minced garlic and ginger to taste
Green onions, roughly chopped
Oil
Light soy sauce and a little oyster sauce
Salt and pepper to taste.
1tsp cornstarch mixed with a little water/stock (optional)

Recipe

If you sliced and chopped everything like I told you in the ingredient list, congratulations, you’re half done already! If you have time to spare, you can marinade the chicken strips for about 30 minutes in a little lemon and soy sauce with a pinch of curry for kicks. But it’s not necessary if you spice the dish itself correctly.

Find yourself a big pan or non-stick wok and plop it on the stove on high. When the pan is nice and hot, and a tablespoon or two of oil and stir fy the chicken briefly until lightly seared.

Remove the strips from the pan, add a little more oil if necessary and begin to cook the onions with the garlic and ginger. Keep stirring so they don’t burn. After about a minute, add in the bell peppers, cook for another minute, add the chicken back in.

Add about a tablespoon of light soy sauce (dark is fine too but then you lose the beautiful colour of the dish) and oyster sauce. Taste for salt and add pepper and other spices to taste. Instead of powdered red pepper I like to chop up real chili peppers and stir them in. Depends on how hot you like your food. As soon as the chicken is cooked through and the bell peppers are cooked but still crunchy, you’re ready to eat!

Last but not least, if you looked at the photo of the dish and thought, “That looks a little dry” then mix up a thin mixture of cornstarch and water or stock, just enough to coat the pieces in the pan without drowning them. Stir in and cook for another minute to get a nice, moist stir fry. Personally if I have really good rice and fresh meat and veggies I don’t mind the dry version, but a little moisture does help it go down easier.

Chopping the veggies can take a bit of time, but the cooking process from start to finish shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes. And then you have a fragrant, colourful dish to entertain your belly with. Enjoy!

November 1, 2017