Burkina Faso - home cooking

I came across a few issues this time round. The most familiar issue was not being able to find a restaurant in London that served the food of Burkina Faso. I did make a point in checking pan-African restaurants that may have a dish or two from the country, but that search was fruitless. 

The second issue was not so common, and dependent on region. In this case, it was the difficulty in finding a dish which was specific to the country, a country which finds itself in a larger region which shares many common traditional dishes - West Africa.

Finally, the third issue, a completely personal one, was neglecting to use an ingredient I bought. A crucial one.

Dealing with issue one is easy. It's time to get back in the kitchen. The second issue took a bit of time. I finally settled on a dish which I couldn't relate to any other country - munyu caf couscous, a meat, tomato and peanut stew. I also decided to serve it with a side dish of Boussan touba - black eyed pea fritters.

For the main, I used lamb as the meat as it is more traditional than chicken or beef, but it would work with those too (in fact, I think it would go better with chicken). I browned half a kg of diced lamb, then added 2 crushed tomatoes, 1 small chopped onion and a good teaspoon of tomato puree. After mixing this I added enough water to cover the mixture in the pot, then added the majority of a jar of smooth peanut butter, mixed until melted. Finally, I threw in one third of a chopped cabbage and one small chopped aubergine. Stir, cover and simmer for an hour.

In the meantime, it was time to get to the side dish. It was all about to go wrong.

I started with half a pound of black eyed peas, and cooked these in boiling water for forty minutes, after which I pounded into a mush. I pureed half an onion and one carrot together and added to the beans and mixed well to create a wet dough. After a generous seasoning of salt and pepper it was time to try and actually create the "fritters".

The trick was to try and create golf ball sized balls of dough. This was disastrous. The mixture was too wet, and just broke apart.

I did manage to get a fairly full frying pan of the Boussan touba on the go, fried one on side for five minutes before turning over and frying on the other side. Disaster. They just broke apart on any attempt to turn them over. Into bits. Many bits. Eventually I lost the plot and just mixed the contents of the pan together to great some kind of Boussan touba hash and fried this.

Luckily, I had only used half of the mixture so far. So I decided to take a different approach and bake the rest in the oven. This was a little more successful, but ended up with a product that was drier than a camel's arse.

Anyway, back to the main dish - surely I wasn't going to mess THAT up too. Thankfully not, it was coming along nicely, if a little too watery. I had to turn the heat up considerably to get rid of some of the excess, although I was keeping in mind that as the stew was largely peanut butter it was bound to thicken on cooling.

Just before the main was of a decent consistency, I threw on some cous cous to cook, then made this into a bed on the plate onto which I spooned the munya caf.

The verdict? Unusual. No flavour was particularly overpowering. Not even moderately. I was pleased that the peanut influence was in no way strong. It maybe could have done with a little more salt. The lamb was cooked perfectly, but I can't say the flavour of the lamb added anything to the sauce. It wasn't an unpleasant meal at all, but it didn't really scream of anything. Other than calories. God only knows how many calories.

The Boussan touba wasn't a complete disaster. The fritters were actually quite tasty, with a flavour that wasn't familiar to me. But as I mentioned before very very dry. Very dry. As I mulled over with Elle what went wrong, the sudden realisation set in. The eggs. The eggs I bought. All six were still on the fridge. Eggs are a key ingredient into binding any kind of mixture to cook with. Binding was the one big thing missing from this meal!

It's a bit of a feature of mine when it comes to cooking. Missing important items. In my defence the recipe I was working from listed eggs in the ingredients, then neglected to say what to do with them in the method. Doesn't take a genius to work out what part they were supposed to play though. A genius I am not. Nor am I a chef really.