Sunday, February 06, 2011

Palmnut Soup Sunday

I’m leaving Ghana in a few days, so am starting to empty out the refrigerator. Today I defrosted some goat meat and smoked fish, along with some cream of palm fruit.

The stock ingredients included just the basics: a few cups of water, a chopped onion, 3 cloves of minced garlic, ~a tablespoon of fresh grated ginger, 2 habanero peppers, a teaspoonful of salt. After the goat meat simmered for awhile (like an hour), I added some smoked tuna, a couple of small zucchini squash I had handy, and 2 tomatoes to soften before blending them into the soup.

It cooked for hours, and filled the house with a comforting aroma. I was only sad there was no one but me to eat it ;-(

It really was begging for fufu, and I heard the thump-thump of neighbors pounding their afternoon fufu, but if I didn’t use up my yam (and some left-over kenkey-like banku), I knew they would go bad.

It was a pleasant dinner. One of our local roosters thought I might share, but though I gave him a few crumbles of banku, the soup was mine alone.

3 comments:

Jan Chinn said...

I want to thank you so much for your blog. I am an American living in the northern Volta, and I love that I can create my own Ghanaian meals for my friends here. Thanks for writing the recipes in a way that a good ole Texsa girl can understand.

Fran said...

Jan: thank you for the kind words. It's comment like these that keep me going.

kadirecipes said...

Hi. Just wanted to say thank you for this recipe. In Guinea we used to cook palm nut soup in a different way and I didn't know about this recipe. I will try it and see.

West African  recipes