African Food

While I have had many types of food in my life, I have never had African food. Now that I am dating someone from Nigeria, it will become a larger part of my diet. Last weekend, I went to visit my boo and he cooked me a delicious dinner as part of our Valentine's day celebration. I wish I had thought then to take a picture of it! Luckily I found this one on google:

This is a Nigerian beef stew. What I had was not as liquidy, but is very similar and was over whole grain rice. To prepare it, he parboiled the meat and then added it to a couple of red peppers, 4-5 small habeneros, beef bouillon, a couple of roma tomatoes, & some water to finish cooking. All of the peppers and tomatoes are blended or food processed to make it kind of pasty and the water is added to make it as runny or thick as you would like. If you want to try it with another kind of meat, just use that type of bouillon flavoring. You can add any type of vegetables that you would enjoy, but a common addition to this "stew" is fried pieces of plantain. I am not sure what this would taste like, but I am not a fan of bananas, so I don't know that I would like it, being that they are from the same family. On Saturday evening, we went to an Ethiopian restaurant in the area to finish our V-day plans. We had an appetizer of little pastries that had meat and rice inside:

For my main course, I had beef kabobs with white rice and spinach. Both of these were served with sides of hot sauce. It kind of looked like this:

And finally, this past weekend I was visiting him again (I attended a friend's baby shower in the area and it was nice to see him two weekends in a row:)).This time one of his roommates made a common bean dish. It consisted of black eyed peas with spicy seasonings (just as with the stew above)and corn over rice.

I have never had black eyed peas before, and I thought they were very delicious!! As much as I enjoy hot food, I think the spice was a bit much, but they also commonly eat their food with bread and that helps with the burning. Of the two kinds of food, I enjoyed the Nigerian food more. I think that the Ethiopian food was good, but just maybe not the best, but it was from a restaurant and I may be bias to home cooked meals. Also, the Nigerian food used whole grain rice rather than white, so this was healthier for me being that I am attempting to eat healthy and stay fit. And though I loved the spinach at the Ethiopian restaurant, it was very salty. However, all of the meals are easy to prepare, even though they may be slightly time consuming and in a couple of weeks when he comes to visit for my birthday I'm going to surprise him by attempting to make a dish myself. Wish me luck!