The most common language is french but people also speak the indigenous languages of Fon and Yoruba.
This coast of Africa was known - sadly - as the slave coast. When slavery was abolished France took over the country and it was known as French Dahomey. It became independent in 1960 and became known as Benin in 1991.
Rice, beans, tomatoes and couscous are staple foods and mandarin oranges, peanuts and pineapples are also very common. Meat is expensive but fish, chicken, beef, goat and bush rat are popular. Choukachou is the local beer made from millet.
For our visit to Benin we decided to forgo the bushrat and use beef instead! We made Beninese Beef Stew and Akkra Funfun (for obvious reasons!).
Today Gary did the cooking while I sat around and annoyed him by making 'helpful' comments - my forte!
Actually we made the Akkra Funfun while the stew was bubbling in the oven but the photos made it to Blogger first and it's too difficult to re arrange them!
We used tinned cannellini beans for the white beans, maybe we should have used dried beans because, although they tasted good the beans refused to stay in balls and didn't looked like the photo in the recipe at all. In fact the first lot that we cooked just disintegrated into the oil.
For the stew we had to make our own West African curry powder using this recipe. It smelt good!
We had okra left in the freezer from another recipe - as it was already cut up small and par-cooked we added it for that last 5 minutes rather than 20.
Our Benin meal.
As we didn't have any Choukachou we drank some local
Nova Scotian beer instead!
The Verdict!
Really good! The best bit about the Akkra Funfun turned out the be their name but the beef stew was delicious. Just slightly spicy but full of flavour.
We weren't expecting great things from Benin but were very pleasantly surprised.
