It all began with a Facebook conversation about stirfried periwinkles…And it ended well – friends wondered if periwinkles could be stirfried and I thought, why not try. But first, blue foods. I’ve always been intrigued by the coplour of periwinkles – that vibrant almost-turquoise that isn’t common at the table. I remember once, a few...
My mission in The New Nigerian Kitchen has many dimensions. It encompasses the totality, the entirety of Nigerian cuisine – from language to preservation of culinary history and heritage, and everything in between. We have to put words to our food, understand them for that’s one of the key ways we’ll be able to explain to others...
The Concept The concept here is of ‘truffles’. Like Chocolate truffles but not… A chocolate truffle is a type of chocolate confectionery, traditionally made with a chocolate ganache centre coated in chocolate, cocoa powder or chopped toasted nuts (typically hazelnuts,almonds or coconut), usually in a spherical, conical, or curved shape. Their name derives from their traditional...
Okwu-oji is a spiced peanut paste served with garden eggs. One day at work, one colleague, P brings a rather large tub of Okwu-oji for another colleague, O. O is sure he’ll never see the bottom of the tub and so was glad to gift me some (that huge tub emptied out sooner than we...
The Concept This concept is as much about visual as it is about taste. In this dish I wanted to highlight: how street food – plantain (bole) & groundnuts can be translated to fine dining how to bring balance to a dish through food pairings how textures and flavours can be repeated in a dish in...
Because sometimes, in spite of your best intentions, things will fail spectacularly. All that’s important then is what you learn and what you decide to do with it. The idea for a goat confit came after a discussion with a friend, B. I don’t remember the exacts but I know I was at a store...
The Concept I said my next concept dish would be plantains, so here we are. When I was growing up, we ate beans on Wednesday and Fridays, afternoons only. We ate beans with fish – fresh, fried, smoked…mostly fried. Dodo, fried yam and garri were accompaniments sometimes. Though I loved the beans my mum cooked,...
I love Puff Puff and trying out new versions is what I love to do – not to say how easy it is to actually do. Some ways Make a new base for the batter So instead of making your puff puff batter solely out of flour, you can add fruit or vegetable purees, like...
Puff Puff. Chinchin. Garau Garau. Fio Fio. Moyin Moyin. ChukChuk. Kuli Kuli. Goody Goody. Double double. Or reduplication if you want to be proper and all linguistic. Because duplicated words, repeated words carry weight. There are things you aren’t conscious of, till somehow you become conscious of them and the patterns emerge. It all began with Deepa,...