Madagascar - Lasopy

Madagascar is a place that most children can point on the map thanks to the animated movie “Madagascar.” It’s an island in the Indian Ocean off the southeastern coast of Africa. The fourth largest island in the world is home to 5 % of the world’s plant and animal species and many are endemic to Madagascar (and look plain weird). Did you know that the country has seventy varieties of lemur?

For our Madagascar meal we had the soup called Lasopy. It’s a vegetable soup that is flavored with meat bones. John, who enjoys cooking, made this soup for me all by himself. He did a great job. We loved it.

Lasopy

You can use any fresh vegetables and meat bones.

3 lbs veal bones
2 qts water
2 TBSP salt
3 carrots, peeled and cut
1 small turnip, peeled and cut
1 cup fresh or frozen string beans
1 cup tomatoes, cut into quarters
1/2 tsp black pepper

Simmer for 1 hour or until vegetables are tender. Remove the veal bones and puree the soup in a blender.

Serve thick and hot.

Ethiopia - Wass Restaurant

When many of us think of Ethiopia we think of the song “We Are the World” and the 1980s famine. My mother was working on the Ethiopian Desk at the State Department in Washington D.C. during that time. She took a trip to one of the famine camps in Ethiopia and she got violently ill from food poisoning, of all things.

Later, when I was in college, my friend, Karla, and I visited my parents in D.C. and we went out for Ethiopian food. For Karla and me, it was our first experience with this cuisine and we both felt a little nauseous when we all dug into a communal plate with our hands, using only the injera bread to pick up pureed beans and bits of meat. It wasn’t an experience we were anxious to repeat.

In fact, I never did go back to an Ethiopian restaurant until recently with Kevin and the kids for my Eat Planet project. There were quite a few Ethiopian restaurants to choose from in the Toronto area, but because of location we chose an establishment called Wass, a new Ethiopian restaurant in Hamilton.

The restaurant was dark and it smelled like cleaning solution. Our waitress, whom I’m guessing was the owner, was very friendly and talkative. She told us that coffee originated in Ethiopia and, if we wanted, she would perform a coffee preparation ceremony. The menu was extensive with lots of explanations and glossy photographs. There was even a detailed description on how to eat with the injera bread. It’s the only restaurant I’ve been to that came with an instruction manual.

I was very interested in the injera bread since I had recently tried to make it myself. The waitress seemed very happy about this but seemed confused when I told her I used teff flour. Because of my interest, I’m assuming, she brought us a free dish to try, chicken with Berbere sauce. It was delicious, better than any thing we ordered for ourselves. We had ordered a lamb dish and a vegetarian combo.

Berbere spice is the key ingredient in most cuisines in Ethiopia and Eritrea. It’s a mixture of spices usually including ginger, fenugreek, cumin, allspice, cloves and cardamon. Sometimes spices are included that are not common in the Western world, but are grown in Ethiopia, like long pepper. The waitress told us that a friend of hers traveled to Ethiopia and came back to Canada with big bags of the Berbere spice. Apparently, this coveted spice was in our chicken dish.

“Many vegetables and fruits grow in Ethiopia,” our waitress assured us. Every time she said the word Ethiopia it sounded like Utopia. “But the government is corrupt,” she said and laughed uneasily. Her country is still synonymous with famine and war.

When I asked her if Ethiopia was doing better, she shrugged. “I’ve never been there. But I want to go.”

Later, a couple of young women walked in and we lost our waitress. She tended to her new customers and then disappeared into the kitchen. We waited a while for our check, and then finally, the kids and I had to go sit in the car because our meter ran out.

The food was good, better than I remembered. But, still, when thinking of Ethiopia the tune of “We Are the World,” pops in my head and I wonder, after all this time, if things have really changed.

Eritrea - The Land of Punt

A small country with big problems, Eritrea, is trying to rebuild after more than thirty years of civil war and conflict with Yemen and Ethiopia. This former colony of Italy – evidence of which can still be seen in the architecture of the capital – is a conglomerate of deserts and fertile lands. It’s known for its long coastline on the Red Sea and bisected by the world’s longest mountain ranges.

In researching Eritrea I found a photograph of the Eritrean Railway that was built during the Italian colonialism. It looked like a scene from a movie – like Out of Africa or The Ghost and The Darkness – and it was so beautiful. Surrounding the railway was mountains of various heights and shades of brown and green, and blue sky; a small train chugged across a railway bridge bellowing out puffs of white smoke.

I am currently reading the book King Leopold’s Ghost and so, despite myself, I find the days of colonialism romantic. It can only be seen this way from a white man’s perspective, of course. Colonialism could be a brutal business but I suppose in some cases good came out of it as well. It depends on how you want to look at it. For instance, during Eritrea’s Italian rule the country underwent industrialization and modern infrastructure was put in place. From a modern Western point-of-view I see this as a good thing, but I wonder what the average Eritrean thought of all that development at the time. Italy ruled Eritrea from 1890 to 1941, only a short span of fifty years. In the 1930s around 100,000 Italian colonists had settled in Colonia Primigenia – this is what Eritrea was called by the Italians.

Because Eritrea is a former province of Ethiopia their food is very similar. For instance, both countries enjoy injera, a pancake-like spongy bread. Pieces of the flat bread is torn off and used to scoop up the food. I decided to make injera, I even found teff flour that I needed at Whole Foods. It wasn’t hard to make, but then again, my injera didn’t exactly turn out the way it was supposed to. For our main Eritrean dish I made Alitcha Birsen, a vegetarian lentil soup. I love lentils and the kids enjoyed the soup. We ate the soup with our spoons, by the way, and ate the injera as I side dish.

From my brief glimpse of Eritrea I get the feeling that it possesses a magical quality. The Egyptian pharaohs referred to present-day Eritrea as The Land of Punt, the area known for its abundant source of gold, ebony, ivory, slaves and wild animals. Eritrea’s capital, Asmara, was to be Mussolini’s “Little Rome” – but it was never to be.

It sounds like Eritrea has great potential. It certainly has a rich history.

Alitcha Birsen

5 TBSP vegetable oil
6 garlic cloves, crushed
250g tomatoes, blanched and peeled
200g lentils
1 tsp salt
1 tsp black pepper
1 tsp ginger
2 fresh red chilies, finely chopped
1 liter boiling water

Heat oil in a pan and fry the garlic until golden. Add the sliced tomatoes and simmer for 5 minutes before adding lentils. Simmer for a few minutes then add the ginger, chili and boiling water. Season with salt and pepper, cover the pan and simmer for an hour.

Injera

1/4 cup teff flour
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup water
A pinch of salt
Peanut or vegetable oil.

Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl then slowly add water stirring to avoid lumps. Add the salt and stir some more.

Heat a nonstick pan and lightly oil the pan. Coat the pan with a thin layer of batter. Injera should be thicker than a crepe. Cook until holes appear on the surface of the bread. Once the surface is dry, remove the bread from the pan and let it cool.

(This is a quick injera recipe. In other recipes that I saw the dough was turned sour by letting it sit for three days).

Equatorial Guinea - Pick A Pepper Soup

Equatorial Guinea might not be a place you’ll want to visit unless you’re the real adventurous type. If you do go, I hope you like it hot, hot on your palate that is. For our Equatorial Guinean meal I cooked a dish called “Pick a Pepper Soup.” It had peppers, all right, and I know that the soup I made didn’t match up to what the soup should have tasted like. But I’ve got kids to cook for so I had to be careful not to make it too spicy. The pepper I refused to put in was the habanero chili. This pepper is the hottest on earth.

I’ve always thought of myself as someone who can take the heat. I grew up eating spicy food. Kevin didn’t. He grew up eating that bland Iowan food. But his palate adjusted, it had to when he visited my parents in China when we were dating. My parents had a Chinese cook and instructed him not to hold back on the spice, and he didn’t. It took Kevin time to build up immunity, if you will. But still, the hottest pepper on earth? I’m not sure I could handle it, though I’d be willing to give it a try, if I could take a very small bite.

If you travel to Equatorial Guinea you may have to take the heat in another way, from corrupt officials who may want a bribe or from a military officer who wants to check all your papers. The former Spanish colony may be small but now is rich in newly discovered oil and has one of the world’s fastest growing economies. But you may not see evidence of this wealth throughout most of its population where many don’t even have access to clean drinking water. It’s the ordinary people of Equatorial Guinea who shouldn’t have to feel the heat.

Pick A Pepper Soup

1 1/2 cups water
450g red snapper fillets (or any firm white fish)
3 medium onions, peeled and sliced
2 tomatoes, chopped
1 red bell pepper, deseeded, chopped
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 habanero chili, deseeded and pounded to a paste
1 bay leaf
1/4 tsp dried basil
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
1/2 tsp paprika
1/2 tsp ground guinea pepper (it is also Ashanti pepper – closely related to the cubeb pepper) I used cubeb pepper which I found at Whole Foods.
Pinch of dried rosemary
1 TBSP lemon juice
1/2 tsp vegetable oil
Bring the water to a boil in a large pot and add all the ingredients except the vegetable oil. Cover the pot and allow to simmer gently for 1 hour, stirring occasionally (add more water if the mixture becomes too dry). After the hour is up add the oil and cook for another 5 minutes. Remove the bay leaf and serve on a bed of rice.

Djibouti - Harira

I’ve been cooking meals around the world since late August and I haven’t attempted to figure up how much I’ve spent on food or how many hours I’ve spent in the kitchen. Each month has blurred into the next and I’m consciously aware that I have way over a hundred countries left to go. Every day I’m obsessively searching for recipes and running to the grocery store. Our dinners begin with my kids asking what country we’re eating and then patiently posing for the camera as I snap away at them eating. They smile in almost every picture even if they don’t like what we’re eating. John, who is very competitive, pushes me to continue so that I finish this project in a year.

My life is centered around food and though I’m not paying much attention to the news anymore I can’t help but be sucked into the same media hype as everyone else, like the Jon and Kate break-up, the mistresses of Tiger Woods and the Swine flu.

Kevin, the kids and I ran out to get our H1N1 shots as soon as we were able, and the night I cooked the Djibouti meal, Kevin called me from work to remind me that it was the last night, until January, for us to get our seasonal flu shots. It was snowing and I considered the inconvenience of going out to the clinic to stand in line with the kids, for God knows how long.

I decided to go but I had already begun cooking. I was making Harira, a beef stew with lentils, chickpeas, tomatoes, spices and pasta. I told Kevin that he would have to finish making it since I had no idea how long it would take us to get the flu shot. He had already gotten his shot at work.

Djibouti is a small country located in the Horn of Africa. It borders Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. There is nothing in the media about this country. It gained independence from France in 1977 - after a hundred years of occupation - and it may be considered just a transit point on the road to Eritrea and Ethiopia but it’s stable with a well organized infrastructure, unlike some of its larger neighbors.

Djibouti is ninety percent desert with the hottest and driest climate on earth. However, it has one of the best harbors on Africa’s eastern coast making its location its main economic asset. Much of Ethiopia’s foreign trade passes through the port, providing Djibouti with its primary source of income. Plus, in an effort to counter terrorism, France and the U.S. have stationed troops in Djibouti. This provides the country with additional income. It’s the only place in Africa where the U.S. has a base.

It ended up taking us well over an hour to get our flu shots and when we got home I saw our Harira. It was a massive conglomerate of food in one big pot, and even though Kevin and the kids didn’t seem to mind it, I didn’t like it at all. There was too much stuff mixed in together and I didn’t like the idea of lentils and pasta together. There was so much of it that we ended up throwing most of it away.

I wasted food for a country that is poor and relying heavily on foreign aid. It made me wonder how I can help feed those who don’t have enough to eat. From now on I’m going to regularly supply the food bank with food – canned food, not my Eat Planet leftovers.

Harira

1 onion, chopped
A pound and a half of steak, cut up into bite-size pieces
1 cup of lentils
1 can chickpeas
1 28 oz. can of chopped tomatoes
1 small can tomato paste
3 lemons, quartered
1 cup chopped celery
1 bunch of cilantro, chopped
1 bunch parsley, chopped
1 tsp ground cumin
1 pinch saffron
3/4 cup sifted flour
2 cups water
1 large handful of angel-hair pasta
Salt and pepper to taste
2 litters of sparkling water

Add oil to a large pot with meat, cumin, saffron, cilantro, parsley, onion, celery, and salt. Cook for 5 minutes then add the sparkling water and cook for a further 10 minutes. (I’m not sure what the sparkling water is suppose to do) Add lentils and chickpeas and cook for 50 minutes. Add the tomatoes and tomato paste and cook for another 20 minutes. Mix the flour with 2 cups of cold water and mix well with a whisk to get out any lumps. Pour this mixture into the pot stirring all the time. Add pasta and cook for 10 minutes. Serve hot and garnish with lemon.