From Nigeria: A Fish Stew

Last December I spent 10 days eating (and working) in Abuja, Nigeria. I discovered that Nigerian food can be quite spicy, and that fish of one kind or another seems to sneak its way into most meals, even a serving a greens. I ate many things I didn’t like and a few I did.

By the end of the trip, I had identified several favorite dishes. First, there was moin-moin – a steamed cake of ground legumes studded with tiny fish and hard-boiled egg, and dyed a lovely rose color from the use of palm oil. I’d usually order moin-moin with a side of dodo, which are fried plantains similar to the ones you’d eat at a Cuban restaurant. I also enjoyed a wide variety of fish stews and soups.

The recipe below creates a fish stew that is rich and comforting – a simple, flavorful dinner on a chilly night. You should use a firm white fish for this dish. We used bream (a.k.a. tilapia), a fish found in Lake Kariba on the border between Zimbabwe and Zambia.

Nigerian Fish Stew
Adapted from Food by Country and Motherland Nigeria
Serves 4

1.2 pounds / 500 grams fish fillets
2 teaspoons salt, or more, to taste
1 tablespoon dried thyme, or more, to taste
1 small red bell pepper, chopped
1 small green chili, minced
1 small onion, chopped
½ cup tomato paste
2 cups vegetable broth
3 tablespoons vegetable oil (palm oil, if you have it)
Salt and black pepper, to taste

Season the fish fillets with salt and thyme, and set aside. Place the red pepper, chili, onion, tomato paste and broth in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Bring to a simmer, and cook for 10 minutes. Add the oil and turn the heat down to low. Cook for 15 minutes. Slice the fish into ¾ -inch strips, and add them to the pot. Simmer for 10 minutes more. Add salt and pepper to taste, and serve the stew over rice.

Tags: recipe, Nigeria, fish, stew, fish stew, Field to Feast, food blog, Africa

Muddy Sadza, Smelly Fish

Last Saturday, Mark, Dorothy and I had a memorable visit to Mbare Musika. This Saturday, Dorothy and I began cooking with our market bounty. Today’s lunch? Sadza rauzviyo, served with kapenta relish. Before we get to these recipes, a here’s little background on sadza, kapenta and relish.

Sadza is the cornerstone of traditional Zimbabwean food, and it can be made with several different types of refined meals. Maize meal is the most popular meal used to make sadza, and it is the meal you typically find for sale in supermarkets. At Mbare market, we were able to buy both sorghum meal and rapoko (finger millet meal, also called zviyo). These meals are rarely stocked in the shops, and are more often eaten in rural areas. Sadza made from maize meal is a light cream color, sadza made from sorghum is light brown, and sadza made from rapoko is a deep, almost purple-brown. A colleague of mine told me that his young daughter calls sadza made from sorghum or rapoko “mud sadza.”

Kapenta, meanwhile, is a type of sardine, originally from Lake Tanganyika in East Africa, which has been introduced to other African lakes, including Lake Kariba. Lake Kariba is a mammoth, manmade lake in northwest Zimbabwe, along the country’s border with Zambia. It was formed in the late 1950s through construction of a dam which provides hydroelectric power to the two countries. In the late 1960s, hundreds of thousands of kapenta were air-lifted from Lake Tanganyika to Lake Kariba. Kapenta fishing is now an important industry. Kapenta are attracted to lights, so the fish are caught at night, sun-dried the next day and distributed throughout the country.

As for relish, well, in Zimbabwe, a relish is the term for just about everything on a person’s plate other than sadza. Sadza is the focus on the meal, and all other components – meat, chicken, greens, kapenta: that’s relish. So, for the moment, forget about the sweet green stuff you dot (or slather) on a hot dog and think small, smelly fish.

Kapenta Relish
Serves 2-3

½ cup dried kapenta
1 teaspoon vegetable oil
1 small onion, chopped
2 small tomatoes, chopped
Pinch of salt

Soak the kapenta in warm water for about 10 minutes. They will, in a very unsettling way, look as if they are returning to life. In order to avoid staring at the rejuvenating kapenta, begin heating the oil in a small frypan over medium-high heat. When the oil is hot, add the onion and sauté for five minutes, or until the onion is translucent. Then, add the tomatoes and the salt. Continue frying, stirring occasionally, for another 5 minutes, or until all the liquid from the tomatoes has been absorbed. Drain the kapenta, and add them to the frypan. Cook for another 5 minutes, and serve with sadza.

Sadza Rauzviyo
Serves 2-3

2 cups water
2 cups zviyo (a.k.a. rapoko)

Bring the water to a boil in a medium saucepan. Turn heat down to medium-high and sprinkle ¾ cup of the meal (a big wooden-spoonful) over the top of the boiling water. Stir briskly, pressing the wooden spoon against the side of the pot to remove any lumps. Keep stirring for about five minutes.

When the mixture is smooth and is beginning to puff and bubble like lava (or, to my eye, the hot mud pools in Rotorua), stop stirring and keep a safe distance from the pot so you will not get hit by a lava burst. After 10 minutes, add another ½ cup of the meal and stir, stir, stir. Once it has been absorbed, add another ½ cup of meal. Stir, stir, stir. Add the remaining ¼ cup, and stir again. The sadza should be thick and smooth, and your arm will be tired. Spoon the sadza onto a plate and let it cool for a few minutes.

Sadza is traditionally eaten with your right hand. Collect some sadza in your right hand, and use it to scoop up your relish – in this case, the kapenta relish. I like sadza rauzviyo much better than the more popular maize-meal sadza; it has a rich, earthy, slightly nutty taste that is very comforting. The kapenta relish is a little too fishy tasting (and smelling) for me, but if you like anchovies and sardines, you will enjoy this relish.

Muddy sadza, smelly fish, tasty lunch.

Tags: recipe, sadza, Zimbabwe, rapoko, rauzviyo, kapenta, relish, main meal, Field to Feast, food blog, Africa

Tiger Fish: From River to Plate

My husband, Mark, eats no beef, chicken or pork and has spent years saving (rather than squishing) spiders, flies and sundry insects by carefully escorting them from inside the house to outside the house. This past weekend, he lost all this positive karma in a two-hour span of fishing on the Zambezi River near Mana Pools National Park in northern Zimbabwe. It was worth it.

Fishing is not a pastime that usually appeals to me, but that afternoon the river was particularly inviting and fishing seemed like a good way to experience it. Once afloat, we saw crocodiles and hippopotamuses plying the shoreline – the crocs impressing us with their stealth, their terror-inducing incisors, and their armor-like scales, and the hippos punctuating the stillness with a ruckus of guffaw-like honks. Saddle-bill storks waded in the tall grasses, white-fronted bee-eaters flitted in and out of their riverbank nests, and a fish eagle manned his treetop look-out. On the Zambian side of the river, this scene was framed by the Zambezi Escarpment, a picturesque row of small mountains.

Although neither of us had cast a line for many years, Mark hauled in two fish, including a tiger fish – one of the most sought-after catches in the Zambezi, largely because of the challenge of reeling it in. Tiger fish are fighters – once hooked, only one in ten are brought onto the boat. Mark and I had several “ones that got away” before he perfected the balance of pulling and reeling, and, in thirty seconds of action-packed drama, caught a four-pounder. The fish was silver, with dotted black lines down its body and a peach-colored tint to its fins and tail. Its sharp, fierce-looking teeth presented a very intimidating appearance. (The literal translation of the fish’s scientific name, Hydrocyon vittatus, is “striped water dog.”) For breeding purposes, female tiger fish are typically thrown back into the river, but Mark’s catch was male and sizeable enough to save for a pre-dinner snack.

Tiger fish is a white fish that tastes similar to bream (a.k.a. tilapia). It is much bonier than bream, however, which means it isn’t very conducive for serving whole or as a filet. The camp chef skillfully prepared Mark’s fish by cutting it into small boneless pieces and frying these pieces in a thick batter. He served the tiger fish nuggets on lettuce, with slices of lemon and tomato. They were gobbled up before I had the chance to take a photo. Apparently, tiger fish is also excellent when pickled.

While we were nibbling on tiger fish, what were the other animals at Mana Pools eating? Well, the elephants were snacking on “elephant cookies,” otherwise known as seed pods of the apple-ring thorn tree. Members of the antelope family were enjoying leaves from the Natal mahogany, which was beginning to flower and smelled like honey. The lions were resting in the shade, so it is likely they had recently gorged on something big like a buffalo. And, how about the crocs? Well, thankfully they weren’t munching on anyone in our party.

Tags: Zimbabwe, fish, tiger fish, travel, Field to Feast, food blog, Africa