I tried something different this year: jollof rice and hot pepper soup, with naan on the side. I have no idea how authentically Nigerian they were, but they were delicious, especially the soup. Something about the base — onions, habeneros, and garlic — was particularly tasty. +1, would cook again.
Dessert will be in about an hour, and I reverted to an American traditional: hot apple pie and ice cream. Come on over, there’s plenty to go around.
Also, much of my highly domestic day was spent scrubbing floors and moving furniture, and I now have a splendid home office, with room to sprawl and lots of bookshelves. My wife is already calling it my man cave, despite the fact that it’s a corner room with lots of windows, and isn’t cave-like at all. In retaliation, I told her that the living room which is now empty (or almost empty) of my junk can be her woman-cave.
I think that the term is “She-shack”.
A man (or woman) cave can be anywhere, it’s all in the attitude.
Cavern of the Trophy Wife
I have a Nigerian dinner that I need help with cooking, please wire $20000 immediately.
Got to love a room with lots of bookshelves!
Congrats on the cooking success! Sounds a bit too spicy for my taste, but then I’m boring. The kids went over to their mothers, so I just went and had dinner out. Traditional turkey with gravy, stuffing, mashed taters and cranberry sauce, that sort of thing. Saving room for pumpkin pie with whipped cream later when the kids get back.
She shed, she shack, she said.
Is it just the alliteration, or is there a (perhaps deep-seated psychological) reason for the “shes” to be isolated (Shedded?) in the back yard?
Draw the curtains and light a few big dribbly candles and you can pretend your office is whatever you like.
Well naan is Indian in origin, so possibly not 100% authentic Nigerian.
Pumpkin lasagna is coming together slower than I’d hoped -.-
I prefer lair or den for my space. Though between the cold, the staph infection, and the medicine for said infection, tomb or crypt might be more accurate. Or maybe toilet (’cause I feel like crap).
Pumpkin lasagna came out well.
I’d offer a recipe but apparently using recipes means you’re a stupid hack who can’t really cook.
(Yes, I am still bitter. >.>)
My place is basically a big cat-cave.
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In their book “Soonish” the Wienersmith family discuss 3D-printing/bioprinting in culinary applications. Cloned human tissue pie?
Or you can use chicken tissue to create a faux roasted whole T-Rex.
Great White Shark lutefisk for the Scandinavian segment of Morris’ population?
Now that the living room has more space, you can put a smaller replica of this statue in it:
https://proxy.freethought.online/singham/2017/11/23/but-the-drawing-looked-fine/
Habaneros are, perhaps, one of the top food ingredients. Heat, Flavour and Umami in perfect amounts for whatever you cook. Other peppers provide more heat and some different flavours but habaneros make almost anything better. Spent many weeks in Jamaica and I’ve probably eaten paving stones cooked in hot sauce, and enjoyed it.
During the early 1980s, I lived in southeastern Nigeria, in the Igbo village Onicha Ngwa (back then, it was in Imo State; since 1991, Abia State). I don’t know the context of your identification of naan, hot pepper soup, and jollof rice as Nigerian, but I don’t recall eating any of those things while I lived there (although I recall the local staples, such as goat meat, cassava, and yams, far more clearly than I do any dish made therefrom). I recount my experience, in response to your wondering how “authentically Nigerian” those foods are. And they certainly may be just as authentically Nigerian as anything I ever ate in-country.
The country is extremely ethnically diverse; at least two dozen separate groups of significant size speak their own home-languages. For all I know, the components of your Thanksgiving meal might have been well familiar to anyone from the non-Igbo four-fifths of the Nigerian population (in the main, the country falls into three or four ethnic groups).
Thanks very much, for sharing your perspective, via this blog. Your analysis is enlightening and your attitude is encouraging. I will continue to read.
Science up!
Superstition down!
@ 10 Azkyroth
Of course a “real” cook would never use a cook book.
Whoever sneered at you was profoundly ignorant of the field of cooking.
There is Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire “The original text was printed for the use of professional chefs and kitchen staff; Escoffier’s introduction to the first edition explains his intention that Le Guide culinaire be used toward the education of the younger generation of cooks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_guide_culinaire#Usage_and_style
I expect any formally trained Western cook has a copy.
Then there is a little book, whose title I forget, which simply lists the ingredients in Le Guide.
This is very handy since a good cook usually does not need to be told “how” to do most usual things–completely new dishes outside the canon are another matter–but is rosemary or sage?
This little book also helps reduce bloodshed in the kitchen. Professional kitchens are high-pressure environments with a wide range of knives and cleavers.
I have even heard of instances where one chef will buy a recipe from another.
It is possible to cook without written recipes. Fuchsia Dunlop, in one of her books, mentions that almost all Chinese cooks over the centuries were illiterate. All one needed to do was train for a few years in a good kitchen.
BTW for Chinese cooking fans, I highly recommend her book “Every Grain of Rice”. I’ve been slowly eating my way through it for a couple of years now.
@10 Azkyroth
Forgot
I’d ask for the recipe but while I like pumpkin (I have half of a small one in the fridge right now) I am not that fond of lasagna.
Hmmmm. Tasty, though I’m not exactly convinced that habaneros and naan have anything to do with Nigeria…