Meal 32: Cape Verde

Note: In 2013, the year after we cooked this meal, this country changed its official name in English to Cabo Verde.

For some countries it's tough to nail down which dishes to cook, but Cape Verde, a cluster of islands off the coast of Senegal, offers an unmistakable national dish. The cachupa is a stew based on dried corn and beans, and what goes in beyond that depends on your family history, socioeconomic status, and whether the rains came.

To inventory the sorts of ingredients that typically go in a cachupa is to trace the extent of the Portuguese empire: corn, dry beans, and manioc from South America; plantains from Southeast Asia; kale, cabbage, and sausage from Europe; and yams from Africa. Conveniently enough, the Spanish colonial pantry overlaps substantially, so I was able to find just about all I needed at the strip of Mexican markets on 5th Avenue in Sunset Park. The only ingredient that I was nervous about finding was unground corn with intact germ (e.g., not nitxamalized), and although dozens of searches on Google and a visit to Brooklyn Kitchen didn't turn up anything, I found it in the Goya aisle of the local Met Foods supermarket. You know that song "Jimmy Crack Corn?" Well, this is that sort of corn.

I should also note that the U.S. is home to a long-established Cape Verdean community. Most of them are in New England, the core having made its way here on American whaling ships in the mid-19th century that often picked up crew in Cape Verde.

Tonight's adventuresome guests were Tammy, Raven, Dan, Chrys, Sean, Tennessee, and Lemuel, who brought lots of gorgeous Cape Verdean music — if you like the sounds of classic Brazilian crooners, you're sure to love it too.

Cachupa rica | Corn, bean and meat stew | Recipe

There are many levels of cachupa-making, depending on how well-off you are and how hearty you want to eat. A cachupinha might be little more than corn, beans, and salt pork, while a cachupa rica can be a wonderland of flora and fauna, and that's what I set out to make.

There's dozens of recipes for cachupa rica on the internet, especially if you search the Portuguese web. I chose to use this one as my base, while mixing with a half-dozen other recipes I found. Here's the mods I made:

• In the spirit of "use what you've got" that is at the core of stewmaking, I substituted the beans I had in the pantry (navy for the stone beans, flageolet for the limas, and cariocas (left over from Brazil!) for kidneys).
• There's so little agreement on what meat to use, so I didn't take the salt pork as gospel. Instead, I used most of a chicken that I'd butchered earlier in the week at a knife skills class, and also threw in some pork spareribs, both of which I marinated the night before in various fresh herbs from the garden. I also added a fair amount of salt to the stew to compensate, but not enough since most people added more salt!
• In addition to the tangy, red choriço, I got some linguiça (aka longaniza), a more garlicky sausage, but left out the blood sausage since some folks don't like that.
• Instead of cabbage, I used kale, since I had a ton on hand.
• Taking yet another cue from other recipes, I put in some chunks of peeled manioc (aka yucca or cassava) and white sweet potato.
• The recipe doesn't specify the number of onions; for the quantity described I used about two medium onions and it turned out fine.
• Finally, with the carcass of that butchered chicken, I made a broth, that I used in place of bouillon.
• I also made a vegetarian version exactly like the meat-based one but, well, without the meat, with a veggie broth, and a higher proportion of veggies.

What can I say, it was a darn good stew. The corn, boiled straight from dry like recommended rather than soaked overnight, had a nice firm texture. Everything was in good balance, not too much meat or veggie, and with three kinds of beans the texture and color was pretty interesting. Also, thankfully, after so much cooking the last two meals, I really appreciated only having to make one dish for the main course!

Pudim de queijo | Cheese custard | Recipe

In contrast to the messload of ingredients in the stew, this custard is just three ingredients: fresh cheese, sugar, and eggs.(OK, a bit of cheating: the burnt sugar requires a bit of oil to make. The custard, which I ended up baking at 350° for about 45 minutes, turned out lovely, rich, and tastier than you'd expect from such a basic assortment of inputs. And with all the leftover egg whites, I made some chocolate-orange meringues, which have nothing to do with Cape Verde but were tasty all the same.

Doce de papaia | Papaya jam | Recipe

I kept seeing this recipe pop up, so I had to do it. Most recipes implied that you need a fairly unripe papaya, but I couldn't find one so I just made this with a big ol' normally-ripe papaya. We cooked it all throughout dinner, so by the time dessert came around the dish got really red, the sugar got thick and even a bit caramelized, and it was a marvelous topping for the pudim. It's also versatile: we had it on french toast with yogurt for brunch the next day, and it was awesome.

That's it for this little island country. Next weekend we're back on the African mainland, to the heart of it in fact with the Central African Republic. We've been planning the recipes with some pretty knowledgeable sources that we'll tell you all about next time!

Photos by Laura Hadden, who's looking forward to putting papaya jam on everything for the next few weeks.

Meal 31: Cameroon

For our first Nosh in DC, we teamed up with WFP USA to host the biggest yet, with over 25 people — just about none of whom Laura or I had ever met! — coming to experience a Cameroonean feast meal. It was quite the affair, with a buffet line, speeches before and after, a Q&A with our guests, a slideshow of prior Noshes, and a really powerful video about the amazing work WFP does that we hope to put online soon. Perhaps the most poignant part of the experience was discussing how the foods we were eating relate to work fighting hunger and malnutrition on the ground.

The development team from WFP USA, which advocates and raises money for the UN's World Food Program, were so friendly and accommodating: Barbara gave us free rein of her kitchen and arranged for the common area in her condo, Courtney organized the invitations and logistics, and Keri Kae drummed up interest on Twitter and then chopped and diced vegetables for hours! Speaking of kitchen help, we couldn't have done it without the skills and humor of my friend since high school, Oliver, who put in a good eight hours of shopping and cooking. Can't wait for his reports on the food of the UN's newest member state, South Sudan, where he's going soon for his first tour as a foreign service officer.

As far as the food, Cameroon is blessed with ocean and rich soils, so the food has generally more flavor and variety than many of its inland neighbors. Like most African cuisine, it's cooked in big pots over flames, as opposed to grilling or baking, so the real limitation was stovetop space and the size of the pots we had on hand. Cooking for such a crowd, in a normal-sized kitchen, was definitely a challenge, but thanks to an African market a mere three blocks away, two sous-chefs, some creative transitions between cooking vessels, and a swarm of angels who cleaned up all the mess while the rest of us ate, it all turned out pretty darn well.

It was a pleasure to meet so many great people, and also really amazing that despite the really short notice (the invites went out eight days before the event!), we raised $635, which is enough for a whopping 2,540 meals!

Poulet DG | Chicken for the boss | Recipe in French (and translated)

In French, directeur-général or DG (pronounced "day-zhay") is the equivalent of CEO. So this chicken, served in a richly flavored sauce of curry and vegetables, is considered a meal fit for the big boss. It took a lot of gymnastics to cook 15-pounds' worth of chicken plus all the veggies across three pots and pans, including some non-traditional finishing-off in the oven to make space for other dishes, but in the end it turned out great, with lovely flavor and fork-tender chicken.

Fufu | Cassava and corn mush

Back for the Burkina Faso meal, we'd used a blend including fermented cornflour to great effect, and I'd read that often Cameroonean fufu is made with fermented cassava, so I went whole-hog on the fermented flour. That might have been a mistake, since the fufu was just too weirdly tangy for most people's taste. Also, as you can see, it's really lumpy, a presentation of which any African grandmother would be ashamed — again, Burkina Faso was better, when we blended the flour with half of the water first, and then added it to boiling water. Well, at least I'm learning about fufu-making through trial and error! By the time we get to Zambia I hope to really have it down.

Koki | Steamed pea cakes | Recipe

Definitely the most attractively exotic-looking portion of the evening! We skinned and mashed half-tender blackeyed peas, added sauteed green pepper and warm palm oil, and made bundles with banana leaves. Then we let them steam gently for a few hours, until the inside cooked to firm. It was quite tasty, with a pretty mild flavor highlighted by that distinctively nutty and rich aroma of palm oil.

Ndolé | Bitterleaf | Recipe

Happily, I was able to find plenty of this distinctive West African vegetable frozen at the store, imported from Sierra Leone in fact. And, well, you can't blame them for false advertising with the name! Even after hours of soaking as advised, these leaves were indeed quite bitter. The peanut butter we put in was barely noticeable in the end result; surely we should have added more. And while the recipe called for both dried shrimp and smoked fish, the pot was nearly full to the brim so we had to choose one or the other, and I decided to err on the side of shrimp — after all, the name Cameroon comes from the Portuguese word camarão, so named for all the shrimp they found in the waters there.

Missole | Fried plantains

Everyone loves these, so much more when they're made extra crispy with that super-high-in-saturated-fat palm oil. Unfortunately, stovetop frying is a slow endeavor and we were already creeping past the advertised meal start time, so unfortunately we had to curtail the frying operation. And I gotta say, after yet another challenge of this matter, I'm making a rule once and for all that I'm just not going to deep-fry things on the stovetop, from now on it's all in a purpose-built deep fryer or picking another dish!

Pepe | Pepper sauce | Recipe

During the meal, one guest remarked, "Wow, this hot sauce makes me finally feel alive!" If pure, hot zip is what you seek, you will love this recipe with its blow-your-brains-out strength of habanero peppers. We even cut it three times with onions and carrots, and mixed in oil, and it was still quite a blast. But it all got consumed, so, success!

For the next few meals at least, I hope to keep it a bit smaller, since cooking so much is really exhausting. But it was a great experience, and I hope to do it again, in DC and beyond.

In related news, we've update our invite sign-up form to include cities we are likely to be noshing in outside of the New York City area in the near future. If you live in DC, Boston, the Bay Area, or the Pacific Northwest, make sure you join the list to find out when we'll be swinging through your town.

Again, many thanks to our new friends in at WFP USA and DC for your generosity of time and money, and especially Barbara for welcoming us so generously into her home.

Photos by Laura Hadden (except for the one that she's in), who particularly enjoyed reconnecting with old friends from FUP.

Meal 30: Canada

Laura is Canadian, Monday was her birthday, and we're at the beginning of the C's. That's a recipe for a Canadian blowout party! For eight hours we fried, drank, and sang our way through the Great White North. We went through the better part of twenty pounds of potatoes, five pounds of cheese curds, a gallon of gravy, and every last bottle of wine in the house. Let's be honest, this isn't a collection of dishes you'd likely find on a table in Halifax or Edmonton — by and large they eat roughly the same up there as we do down here, perhaps with more ketchup squirted on top. But by dint of history, marketing, and circumstance, there are indeed some dishes that are classically Canuck. Not surprisingly given the universal link between cultural identity and cuisine, many of the dishes come from the French Canadians, who have had a complex identity with and within Canada ever since becoming subjects of the British Crown after the French and Indian War in the eighteenth century.

We had about thirty people come and go throughout the afternoon and evening — including Laura's mom Eileen and sister Jen, who were visiting! It was a lovely day, and our first meal of the year outside. This time we took a break from fundraising for the World Food Program, and instead asked guests to support Laura's fundraising ride in the upcoming Five Boro Bike Tour benefitting CAMFED, an amazing organization that directly supports girls' education in sub-Saharan Africa. Please consider donating!

Poutine | Fries with cheese curds and gravy | Recipe

In Quebecois French, une poutine is "a mess." Never has a food been given a more appropriate name! Interestingly, the dish was only invented about 50 years ago, but has become so widespread that it topped a survey of Canadians as being their national dish. Anyway, French fries topped with cheese curds and smothered with gravy  is just as disgustingly awesome as it sounds. Let's deconstruct it:

• Fries: Unlike Belgian fries, which I made with yukon gold potatoes to replicate the lower-starch bintje variety, a classic North American fry is made with a starchier potato like good ol' Idaho russets. (Though in Canada, Prince Edward Island is the famous spud-grower). I left the potatoes unpeeled 'cause I prefer them that way, soaked them in ice water for a half hour after slicing to draw out some of the starch, drained them and let them air-dry, fried for about 8 minutes at 325° to cook them through, let them sit for about 20 more minutes, and then finally crisped the for a few minutes at 370°. It's a lot of steps, but makes for a potato that's soft on the inside and crispy on the outside.
• Gravy: To make chicken stock, I swear by the technique in Cooks Illustrated's The New Best Recipe, which eschews carrots and other aromatics and just has you concentrate on drawing as much flavor out of the meat as possible. This one I made with a seven-pound roaster (minus the breast, which I actually simmered as the stock was cooking and used for sandwiches). Making the gravy was super-simple, just throw in some butter and flour and whisk it good. (I also made a vegetarian version using a boxed broth.)
• Cheese curds: These little lumps of joy taste like medium-mild cheddar, but due to their higher moisture content they melt fantastically. When they're super-fresh they squeak when you bite into them, but cheese curd options are limited in NYC, and even though I got the freshest ones I could find at Saxelby Cheesemongers, we didn't get that experience. But oh well.

The result: everyone who'd ever had poutine before said this was the best they'd tasted. Hooray!

Tourtière | Spiced pork pie | Recipe

The tourte is a long-extinct pigeon that was once the filling of this pie, traditionally served by French Canadians on Christmas Eve. The place is now taken by pork, but the combination of spices such as sage, thyme, and cloves give a beautifully comforting and old-timey flavor.

Pastry has always been my cooking weak spot, and I've been steadily improving, but I gladly put this job in Eileen's expert hands as you see above. Her expertise is not only in technique, but also in recipes. Rather than what's given in the linked recipe, the pastry we used for both the pie and the butter tarts is as follows. It's enough for two whole pies (or 24 butter tarts):

5 1/2 cups of flour 1/2 tsp salt Cut in 2 cups of Crisco Mix with 1 egg, 2 tsp vinegar and enough cold water to make 1 cup total of liquid

The dough holds up nicely when you work it, especially if you refrigerate it for a while. It's also delightfully flaky in that Crisco way.

Kraft Dinner

We wouldn't have to eat Kraft Dinner But we would eat Kraft Dinner Of course we would, we'd just eat more. And buy really expensive ketchups with it. That's right, all the fanciest... Dijon ketchups! Mmm. —  If I Had $1,000,000 Dollars, Barenaked Ladies

Sure, the day-glo yellow of Kraft Mac & Cheese was a staple for many of us who grew up in the States. I can't even look at my parents' six-quart saucepan without smelling the tang of powdered cheese. But only Canadians sing about this easy-to-prepare boxed meal, or assign it a rarified two-letter nickname — KD. They are, far and away, the world's most avid consumers of the blue boxes, so along with time-consuming dishes of distinctive patrimony, Raven whipped up a big batch.

I really wish someone had told ten-year-old me that mac and cheese goes so well with ketchup. I guess the Barenaked Ladies tried to, but I didn't catch the message. According to our friend from Calgary, Ophira Eisenberg, KD with ketchup and scallions is known as "Skiiers' Delight," and that's exactly how we enjoyed it.

Fèves au lard | Maple baked beans | Recipe

Truth be told, finding truly Canadian dishes was tough, and everything I was finding was so fatty and unhealthy. I begged Laura and her mom for advice on a vegetable dish, but none was forthcoming. What joy when I found this dish for baked beans made with maple syrup...they're not veggies, but they are healthier! In context of the meal, the pound of salt pork that seasoned the double-batch of beans was a mere condiment for healthsome beans. Whether you make it with the pork, or try the smoky vegan version, you won't be disappointed. It takes a long time, but with the firmness of the beans and the rich and subtle sweetness of the sauce that coats them, you'll realize that canned baked beans just pale in comparison. If there's one dish that I learned from this meal that I'd make again, it was these!

Caesar | Bloody mary with Clamato | Recipe

Who knows why Mott's decided to market a tomato juice with a bit of clam flavoring, but luckily for them, a bartender in Calgary discovered Clamato and fixed a bloody mary-type drink with it, garnished with celery salt, and the rest is history. This drink has a firm lock on the Canadian cocktail pantheon but is virtually unknown elsewhere. Luckily, you can still find Clamato in the U.S., but with Spanish labeling, since it's what you mix with beer and hot sauce for a chelada.

Shotski

image credit: Raven Keller

Laura and I encountered the shotski at her cousin Ryan's wedding up in Whistler. Glue shot glasses to a ski, fill with shots of choice, get friends together, kneel down, put glasses to your lips, and toss it back on the count of three. I couldn't find Sortilege, so I made it myself by shaking Canadian Club whiskey with maple syrup (in roughly a 4:1 ratio) with ice and straining. The shotski was fun, and the drink was tasty. And now we have a six foot board with shot glasses emblazoned with Canadiana that we've got to store somewhere!

Butter tarts | Recipe

When I proposed to Laura, I placed the ring in a butter tart. When word traveled north of this deed, her aunts, uncles, and cousins were instantly inclined to like me. That's how important these gooey, crispy, addictive desserts are to her, her extended family, and millions of Canadians. Like the Caesar, this treat is way popular in Canada, served in diners and Tim Horton's and houses across the land, but barely seems to have made it down south. This heavenly combination of raisins, corn syrup, brown sugar, butter, and pastry crust is overdue to invade! (The closest we've found is the Momofuku crack pie, but it truly pales in comparison.)

Ice creams | Recipes: Maple, blueberry

  

With all the cold that comes from living up north, you'd think Canadians wouldn't be into frozen desserts. But you'd be wrong! Turns out Canada has the sixth-highest per capita ice cream consumption, and I like making ice cream, so the deal was sealed.

The blueberry ice cream was made from wild berries picked in northern Quebec, which conveniently enough are available frozen at Trader Joe's. And oh, how tasty they are: they're really small, but bursting with a depth of flavor that's just lacking from the larger, commercially grown ones. For this I simmered the frozen berries with some lemonade (ha, it's what I had on hand) until it made a lovely thick sauce, and then mixed that in with a standard custard ice cream base. The maple was similar, but a lot easier: just replace most of the sugar with maple syrup, and make ice cream as normal. Both were fantastic; the latter is especially good scooped on top of a butter tart.

To go along with everything, Laura made up a list of Canadian musicians. Take a look, you'll be amazed at just how many great musicians come from up there. Probably has something to do with content laws that require one quarter of all music on the radio to be from Canadian artists.

Phew! That was a lot of fun, and quite a wipeout. Learned a few things about hosting for such a big crowd. One thing we did really right was making it over a long time period, so people could come and go and we were never too packed. A lesson for next time is to not make something that requires short-order prep like poutine; that occupied a lot of my time and had me on my feet for hours on end, although we did have the deep fryer set up where I could hang out.

Thirty meals down, 164 to go. Next up, Cameroon!

Photos by Laura Hadden, who refuses to disclose how many butter tarts she ate.

Meal 29: Cambodia

Having grown up in the Bay Area, I had more than my fair share of many southeast Asian cuisines, including Thai, Vietnamese, even Burmese. But I'd never really encountered Cambodian until this meal. The core ingredients are pretty similar to those of its neighbors, especially the triptych of galangal, kaffir lime leaf and lemongrass. Yet as the Wikipedia page observes, the country is full of wetlands and floodplains, a geography which is reflected in a culinary style where solid and liquid frequently coexist.

We were super fortunate to have two Cambodians on hand, Navin and Melanie, who suggested what to cook and swept in to correct flavors — which involved a lot more fish sauce! — and finish up the presentation. Also attending were Christen, Nikki, J.P, Tennessee and Bill.

Somlor machu kreung ktih sach chrook | Sour pork rib and lemongrass soup | Recipe

For both this and the amok, I made a kreung, a paste with fresh herbs and roots including turmeric, galangal, garlic, shallots, and very notably lemongrass. With a long and slow stewing of the pork ribs, and later on some tamarind, this soup had a super rich flavor. Melanie added a few limes at the end, probably because I got sweet tamarind rather than sour. In the end, it was rich and tasty and appropriately spiced, and with rice below and greens on top, it did indeed resemble those wetlands, so far as I can surmise.

Trokuon | Water spinach

This plant is known by so many different names, including morning glory, swamp cabbage, Chinese spinach, and ong choy. Despite the fact that I bought it at one of Chinatown's biggest supermarkets, it turns out that this plant is classified as a "noxious weed" by the USDA due to its ability to spread quickly out of control, and is technically illegal to sell or purchase. Anyway, it's a novel plant for me: the stems are hollow, and are more prized than the leaves. Our friends wanted to sauté it with oyster sauce, but since I didn't have that, we improvised with garlic and fish sauce.

Amok trei | Steamed fish custard | Recipe (and observe comment below, and add a few eggs)

Most recipes I read for this, commonly called Cambodia's national dish, mentioned that it's traditional to steam it in leaves but the recipe author usually just steams it in a bowl. Well, how often are we gonna make this? Let's do it right. Our guests very creatively crafted these boats out of banana leaves and toothpicks, which were perfectly watertight for holding the mix of fish in coconut milk and spices. Although the recipe doesn't call for it, Navin advised adding a few eggs to make it firm up, and that was great advice. The final product was very soft and tender, with a lovely flavor, and just firm enough to quality as a custard.

Num pa chok tari trey | Fish curry noodle soup | Recipe

Like much of Southeast Asia, curries swept east from India into Cambodia. This version puts a local twist by adding lemongrass and the like to a yellow curry paste, and the noodles were a good contrast from the rice of the rest of the meal The recipe called for fish but I subbed shrimp just for variety.

Fruits

Luckily it was a good day for fruit in Chinatown! Up and down Canal Street, vendors were selling beautifully exotic dragonfruit, musta been a shipment that just came in. One website I found accuses them of being the "Wonderbra of fruit" in that they promise so much but deliver so little, but I'll be darned, these were just as subtly tasty as what I had in Vietnam many years ago.

The star of the show was durian, the famously spiky and pungent fruit. Note how Navin used a garden glove to hold it, and after making a few slices from top to bottom, she peeled back the ridiculously sharp skin to reveal pods that look somewhere between raw chicken, half-molten ice cream, and alien larvae. And the taste? Well, the Cambodians enjoyed it, a number of us really didn't like it on first taste, and J.P. ate two of them and still couldn't decide if it was repulsive or alluring.

 To round out the fruit course, we had a ripe and tart mango with salt and chili for dipping, and segments of jackfruit, whose pods look like smaller durian segments but are unambiguously delicious and far less mushy. But let's admit it, while the flavors are fun, it's really the crazy colors and shapes that bring the most enjoyment:

Now attention turns to Canada, for which we'll be throwing a big party celebrating Laura's birthday. Can't wait to report on poutine and much more!

Meal 28: Burkina Faso

Our plans took us to Cambridge, MA this weekend, so for the third time, we took United Noshes on the road. This week was Burkina Faso, a landlocked West African former French colony, and I was not terribly confident that we'd find the proper ingredients in the Boston area, given that it's not very easy in New York. But lo and behold, the Tropical Foods market in Roxbury had just about everything, including sumbala seeds and fermented cornflour. Heck, they even had the unhulled millet that eluded me in Brooklyn!

While we were able to enjoy a plentiful and tasty meal from Burkina Faso, that's a privilege that many there are lacking these days, as another drought has hit the Sahel region that stretches along the southern edge of the Sahara. With failed harvests and high food prices, the work of the World Food Program to both provide immediate relief and help mitigate future disasters is so important. With this meal we raised $190; please take a look at this slideshow to see the people whom the WFP helps.

Our gracious hosts were Jesse R. and Clara, and the guests were Otto, Laura G.,  Maya, and Micah. The crowd was quite game for the adventure of eating thick mush and stew with their hands and washing it down with sweetened flower extract.

There's precious little in the way of Burkinabè recipes online in English, and most of what I found didn't strike me as terribly distinctive. Instead, these recipes come from French-language blogs and sites about Burkina Faso; if the dishes are of interest you should be able to make do with Google Translate. If you're still lost, leave a comment and I'll help from my experience making these.

Bissap | Perfumed flower drink | Recipe

This purple-red flower is very similar to hibiscus and sorrel (known as jamaica in Spanish), all of which can be made into a tasty drink. Bissap is pretty darn tart, so after boiling and draining, you add quite a bit of sugar. This recipe also had us put in orange blossom water, vanilla sugar (we substituted vanilla extract), and nutmeg. The result is a tangy, complex, refreshing drink that's begging to be mixed with rum!

Zoomkoom | Millet and tamarind drink | Recipe

In Mooré, zoom means flour and koom means water. This is a traditional drink of hospitality, and I can imagine that if you're mostly thirsty but also a little hungry after a hot day of traveling, this concoction would hit the spot. If you have a tough time imagining that a drink laden with millet flour would be appealing, think of it as African horchata and you'll do just fine.

Tô | Millet and cornflour mush | Recipe

Out of all the mush we've stirred for United Noshes thus far, this one was hands down the best, both for flavor and texture. I used about one-third millet flour and two-thirds fermented cornflour, the latter of which made for a really nice tanginess. This recipe also has you mix some water with the flour to make a creamy paste, and then pour it into boiling water. All in all it was faster, easier, and made for a great thick texture that easily passed the stirring-stick-stating-straight test and was super easy for eating with the hands.

Sauce gombos | Okra and onion sauce | Recipe

Every time I try a new technique for pounding vegetables, I realize how much we need to get the true, big African mortar and pestle. This time, our host Jesse R. put okra and onions in plastic bags and smashed them with a rolling pin. It turned out fine but was really loud and messy. Anyway, the dish turned out ok but a little dry, I'm wondering if the recipe should have had us put in some water.

Sauce à la pâte d'arachides | Peanut butter sauce | Recipe

I made both a meat version with lamb as well as a vegetarian one with extra cabbage. This dish was quite tasty, though eating peanut sauce with rice with your hands is really messy! If you're making this recipe, be advised that since you have to boil off most of the water before serving, be judicious in how much you add unless you have a long time and don't mind thoroughly boiled meat. Also, if you like spicy foods, this could definitely have done well with some chili pepper.

Bourmassa | Sweet beignets | Recipe

It doesn't get much simpler than balls of flour and sugar, leavened with flour, and fried. It's also hard to imagine a more simply satisfying treat. Crisp and golden brown on the outside, soft and spongy on the inside. Yum.

Spotify came through yet again, with more than enough lovely tunes from Ouagadougou and beyond. You may enjoy the playlist Laura made.

And that's a wrap for the B's! These 17 meals took us across five continents, so please check out our Noshies awards for the best, worst, and most notable discoveries from the past several months.