Country 29 - Cabo Verde

The Republic of Cabo Verde is an Island country in the central Atlantic. It comprises of 10 volcanic islands, 9 of which are inhabited. The islands lay about 600 km west of Cap Vert, a peninsula of Senegal, and from which they get their name. The archipelago was uninhabited until the fifthteenth century when Portuguese explores discovered it. It was an 'ideal' (?) position for the slave trade and became a hideout for pirates and buccaneers. The islands became independent from Portugal in 1975.

Since the 1990's the Islands have operated as a democracy and are one of the most advanced and democratic countries in Africa. They lack natural resources so they are dependent on tourism and foreign investment. Their culture is a mix of African and European and their cuisine is West African with influences from Portugal, fish being a staple.

Corn, beans, rice, potatoes, cassava and vegetables are the basis for most meals with fish such as tuna, sawfish and lobster, they also eat pork, chicken and eggs. They import wine and olives from Portugal and drink Grogue, a type of rum.

Chachupa is the national dish made from mashed maize, onions, green bananas, cassava, sweet potatoes, squash and yam.

We really struggled to find recipes for Cabo Verde, because, although the whole point of this journey is to try new food, we also want to ensure we don't waste food because we don't like it! I like fish and I like curry but I don't enjoy fish curry, same goes for stew - it's good but doesn't need to have fish in it! In the end we found a compromise.

We made Jagacinda, Gufong and chocolate syrup - yes a dessert!!!

We started the Jagacinda first. We had spicy Spanish style sausages in the freezer so we used them. We also used tinned butter beans for the white beans. The recipe calls for 'paprika', we used smoked hot paprika as it has more taste and seemed appropriate.

After we had fried all the ingredients we added water and rice, brought it all to the boil, switched the heat off and left the rice to steam for 20 minutes.  

It smelt really good and tasted even better.

Now it was time to make dessert.

We decided we would make Gufong as they remind us of the churros we had on holiday in Spain when the children were small.

On our first Spanish holiday we stayed in a small village called Orgiva, it is in the Alpujarra mountains in Andalusia. We observed that the locals all went to a certain cafe and had a type of doughnut and chocolate sauce for their breakfast/mid morning snack. It looked good, so we joined them ordering churros and chocolate sauce for 4 people. We received about 4 miles worth of doughnut and four cartons of chocolate milk! it took quite a lot of gesticulation to actually get the pots of chocolate sauce that all the locals had! Stupid tourists!!

You need cornmeal and flour for this recipe, well we had the corn flour that I use to make fajitas so we used that and durum wheat semolina flour to get the texture. It made a very sticky dough.

We haven't got a deep fryer at the moment, so we had to sort of deep/shallow fry them! They took ages to go golden brown....

and then they were very brown indeed! Just dark brown, definitely not burnt!

mmmm, lots of chocolate sauce

So you dip the Gufong in the icing sugar and then into the chocolate sauce - or the other way round! 

They taste better than they look! 😅

The Verdict.

The Jagacinda was really good, a bit like paella or jambalaya I guess. We had lots left over.  The Gufong were good too, if a bit heavy. We had made too many but we managed to eat them anyway! 

Country 28 - Burundi

The Republic of Burundi is a landlocked country in the Great Riff Valley of Africa. It is bordered by Rwanda, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Lake Tanganyika. 

Burundi was colonized by Germany and Belgium during the 20 century but became independent in 1962. Before then it was an independent kingdom. During the 1970's there were two civil wars, bouts of ethnic cleansing and genocide which resulted in hundreds of deaths and the country became one of the world's poorest.

In 2000 the two main tribes, Hutu and Tutsi, signed an agreement for a ceasefire, however, there is still unrest in the country.

Burundi is mainly a rural country with a high - and growing - population, the average woman has 6.3 children, the fifth highest in the world. Their culture is based on local traditions and as most people are farmers their diet consists of sweet potato, corn and peas. Meat is only eaten a few times each month.

It's a year since we last 'travelled' on our world food adventure. The food of Burundi was daunting and we kept putting it off. However we finally decided to give it a try - after all we are privileged to have a choice in what we eat!

For our Burundian meal we made: Ibiharage; Boko Boko Harees and North African spiced carrots. 😁

Boko Boko Harees

I had a bit of a panic as I began to cook as I realised that although I had read the recipes several times I hadn't noticed that the bulgur wheat had to soak for 3 hours! It was lucky that I had begun my prep early!                  

The main ingredients were: bulgur wheat; chicken breast; onion; turmeric and chicken giblets. Haha, chicken giblets! They are really hard to find over here, sometimes we get them in a whole free range chicken and we use them to make sock for gravy. So they were going to be missing from this dish.                                                                                                  

As I was cooking I also noticed that although the recipe asked for grated onions and sliced onion in the list of ingredients it didn't mention the grated ones in the recipe - and I had cried buckets while grating them too - so we added them to the onion rings. We also had to make a paste from turmeric and water - I am sure I took a photo of this but I can't find it! 😁

 

The prepared ingredients, the ghee is added at
the end of the cooking process.

There is something very strange about boiling chicken to cook it.
In the pot is bulgur wheat, chicken and a little salt!

The bulgur wheat and chicken had to be cooked until they had the consistency of thick dough! Mmmm!

The Boko Boko Harees is served with fried onion rings and the turmeric paste.

Ibiharage

We bought canned navy beans (which are white not navy! 😂) so we didn't have to soak them. I also made the berbere mixed spice (coriander seeds, cumin, fenugreek, peppercorns, all spice, cardamon, cloves, chillies, sweet paprika, salt, nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon, turmeric) It smells delicious.

Other ingredients are onions, garlic, salt.

Ready to start cooking.

It only takes a few minutes to make this dish. After frying the onions and garlic to soften them you just stir in the beans and finally add the spice and salt.

North African Spiced Carrots

I think this is a more general African dish, we included it to add vegetables to our meal. The ingredients are: garlic, paprika, cumin, coriander seed, lemon juice, and parsley.

The ingredients ready to begin cooking. You fry the spices for a while and then add the lemon juice and water and cook till 'syrupy', apparently the carrots should only take a few minutes to cook when added but ours took longer.

When the carrots are cooked you add parsley and lemon zest - if you have some!


The finished meal

To be honest I should have arranged this in a more
picturesque way on my plate!

It was all very beige! Haha! Even our carrots were pale orange.
You can see the turmeric paste and fried onions on the top of the
Boko Boko Harees.

Verdict

It was ok! We have been surprised before about how flavoursome boiled chicken can be, but the bulgur wheat had become very gloopy and was very filling. The fried onion added flavour but I wasnt a fan of the turmeric paste, it was quite grainy.

The carrots and beans were good, not good enough for us to feel compelled to eat them again but still quite tasty.