Tag: How to

Techniques

How To Roast Pumpkin

My children have fallen in love with Butternut squash soup. It’s our ‘winter’ of rain and cold so we’re lapping up soups with crusty bread. When I don’t want to fork out cash for expensive, imported Butternut squash, I buy Pumpkin. Prepping it is easy. I wash well and then try my best to cut […]

Nigerian Cuisine, Techniques

How to Make Starch, Usi

Your foremost primer to making the best starch ever :). Starch. Usi to my Isoko heritage. Of cassava, like corn starch. Smooth, almost satiny on the fingers. And yes, this is the self same starch for stiffening clothes. Combined with palm oil, heated till a stretchy mass is formed, this is one of my favourite things […]

Techniques

How to Make Drying Racks

Ages ago, I used to make handmade paper. In my mum’s blender in our backyard in Warri. The same blender that pureed our tomatoes and onions for stew. The very same one. When my children were old enough to learn about recycling, we made screens for scooping and drying our sheets of pink and lilac […]

Techniques

Blender (cf. Food Processor)

When you’ve just moved house, and you can’t locate the lid to your food processor yet need to process ‘solids’, I suggest you get out your blender. Before you argue with me about the boundaries of what one could consider ‘just moved’ house, I’ll let you know we have different standards of measurement. ‘Just moved’ is when I’m […]

Nigerian Cuisine, Techniques

The Anatomy of Cassava

I’ve eaten cassava products all my life but I’d never tasted the cooked/ boiled tuber till last weekend. It is an interesting combination of starchy and chewy and a taste that isn’t as distinctive as I expected.  What it looks like Think long tubers, about 20 – 30cm with tough brown skins bearing some resemblance […]