Exciting Easter Menu Tips

It’s a few days to Easter and I’m sure quite a number of people out there would have started having those silent brain storming moments where they try and figure out the best way to wow the family this Easter; Food wise that is.

Well, I will be sharing a few ideas of things you can make to create that wonderful dining experience for your family and loved ones.

Grilling and Barbecuing: A family that grills together stays together. Grilling is a fun way to keep the atmosphere at home exciting this Easter. From grilled chicken to burgers, it is extremely easy and cost efficient. For those that do not have fancy grills at home, you can easily build a coal grill. Look for a metal basin/bucket, fill it up half way with sand and spread coal all over it. Place metal gauze and you have yourself a coal grill. Feel free to go through my earlier post on how to achieve well grilled chicken. Also, you can contact me via email for burger recipes or other grill related recipes.

 

 

Fish and Chips: This will make a great appetizer before the main entrée. You can get a bag of already peeled and sliced potatoes at Shoprite or any food mart. I prefer seasoning my fries with a mixture salt, dry pepper and seasoning immediately after deep frying them. For your fish, you can either grill or deep fry in batter after marinating.

 

Rice dishes: From Chinese fried rice to Coconut rice, Jollof rice… I tell you the list is endless. There are a few rice recipes I posted earlier on this site that will surely make your Easter menu stand out this year.

 

Kindly visit my earlier posts for more mouth-watering and exciting recipes you can make for the family this holiday.

Have a great Easter.

Easter Chicken 101

With Easter around the corner, here are a few tips on achieving fantastic results with your birds. The traditional way of treating chicken in most homes is first to boil for several minutes and fry. By doing this, one has simply succeeded in over cooking the chicken. I will be sharing a few tips you can use in preparing that wonderful, mouth-watering and juicy Easter chicken your family would truly enjoy.

First thing you want to do is to understand the kind of bird you have. Is it soft or hard chicken, whole turkey/chicken or duck? The cooking time for these birds varies because of their different textures.

With that out of the way, the next important step is to brine your bird. With brining, you can never go wrong. It makes your chicken really juicy, tender and gives it a great taste. It is a great way of seasoning your chicken uniformly and can either be used for chicken parts or whole chicken.

Here is my brining process. Feel free to use it or you can modify and come up with yours. Pour some water into a pot.  Make sure the volume of water is enough to fully submerge the chicken you want to brine. Place the water on your burner. As soon as the water starts getting warm, add equal quantity of salt and brown sugar (3/4 cup full should do), smashed garlic, squeeze some lemon juice into it and also throw what is left of the lemon into the pot, cut an onion into 2 halves and add to it. Also add bay leaves. Stir and put out the flame and allow the temperature of the mixture to drop. Make sure the temperature of your brine mixture has totally dropped before you submerge your chicken (It should not even be warm). Placing your pot in a bowl containing ice can help speed up this process.

Submerge your chicken in the brine mixture and keep the brining chicken in your fridge for 2hours if you are brining chicken parts and 6 hours if it is a whole chicken.

Then bring out your chicken from the brine, pat dry with paper towels, give the chicken a good dry rub (dry red pepper, powdered ginger, freshly ground black pepper, paprika  and seasoning) and  deep fry/grill/oven bake to get that great tasting chicken for the family during Easter.

Happy Easter everyone!

BANGA SOUP

Undoubtedly one of the most loved soups in the Niger delta region of Nigeria. It is made using extract from palm kernel seeds and eaten with either starch or garri (although some people also eat with white rice).

I will be making this dish as simple as possible as I will only be teaching the basics. You can decide to add anything extra you would want to see in your soup.

For this dish, I will be using the following:

Palm Kernel seeds (mix the native and agric when buying)

Yellow pepper

Crayfish

Lemon grass

Chicken/assorted meat/turkey (depends on your preference)

Smoked fish

Periwinkle

Onion

Seasoning

Salt

Wash the palm kernel seeds and boil for about 45minutes. Allow to cool by running water into the pot and with your hands, rub the seeds together to extract the oil. Add some water and sieve out the oil extract.

Put the oil extract in a pot and place pot on a flame and allow to boil. Blend the yellow pepper & onions and add to the boiling oil extract. Allow to boil for 30mins and add your boiled meat/chicken/turkey and some of the stock/broth. Allow to boil for another 30mins. Tie up the lemon grass and add to the soup. Then add the smoked fish, periwinkle, seasoning and salt. Allow to boil for another 10mins and put out flame.

 

 

 

How Well Do You Know Your Beans???

Beans are a power house of nutrition. It amazes me when I see a lot of people buy cooked rice and opt for fried plantain (high in cholesterols) rather than beans. In this part of the world, it gets somewhat comical when you see a lady eating bread and beans. What people fail to consider is the nutritional values that come with what is popularly referred to as B².

Be it in the form of bean pie (moi-moi) or bean fritters (Akara), beans should always be a part of our everyday meal as its nutritional values cannot be over-emphasized.

 

Here are a few of the reasons why beans, as a meal, should be taken seriously:

·         Studies have shown that women who ate beans at least twice a week had a 25 percent lower risk of breast cancer than women who ate them just once a month.

·         Copper, which is crucial for maintaining a glowing skin pigment and connecting tissues, is found in beans. Several enzymes in the body also need copper (found in beans) to function properly.

·         Studies have also shown that dietary protein and soluble fiber found in beans help prevent hypertension and improve control of it.

·         Folate is, of course, a must for any woman considering having children, as it helps prevent defects in developing neural tubes. One cup of beans provides a whopping 90 percent of the daily value (DV) of folate.

·         People who eat beans have a 22 percent lower risk of obesity and are more likely to have a smaller waist than people who don’t eat beans. Beans are high in soluble fibre, which slows digestion and makes you feel full longer. One cup (250 mL) of beans, for example, provides 60 percent of the daily value (DV)* for fibre.

·         Beans are also great sources to stabilize your blood sugar levels. The soluble fiber lowers down the movement of glucose sourced from food into the bloodstream. As a result, your body produces lesser insulin which is beneficial since higher levels instigate diabetes.

 

Well prepared beans can be taken with pap, bread, yam, garri, rice etc. University students in Nigeria would always attest to the fact that ABC, has literally saved lives on so many occasions especially on days prior to their exams. Did I hear someone ask for the meaning of ABC? It simply means Akara Bread and Coke.

Beans are one of the healthiest and cheapest foods you can find around. So why don’t you do yourself a favor today and give beans that prominent role it deserves on your daily dietary list?

 

Chinese Egg Fried Rice with Pancetta

Once again this is another very easy dish to make. Pancetta (pronounced Panchetta) is diced smoked pork. It can be found in most meat marts. For my Muslim readers, kindly use shrimps or prawns in place of Pancetta.

For this dish, we will need the following:

Rice (you can use basmati or regular rice)

Eggs

Pancetta

Canola/Vegetable oil

Chopped Green, yellow and red pepper

Green Peas

Chopped Onions

Diced garlic and ginger

Soy sauce

Oyster sauce

Curry

Lemon zest (optional)

Seasoning

Salt

Parboil the rice and set aside.

Break the eggs into a bowl. Add a few drops of soy sauce and 2 table spoonful of water and whisk.

Heat up your wok/frying pan and add 2 table spoonful of vegetable oil. Pour in your whisked eggs and scramble. Empty the contents of the wok/frying pan into a bowl and set aside. Place the wok/frying pan back on the flame. Add 3 table spoonful of vegetable oil. Allow to get very hot and add the chopped onions, diced garlic and lemon zest. Stir for a while and add the pancetta. Stir for about 5 minutes and add the chopped green, yellow and red pepper. Reduce the flame and stir. Add some curry and oyster sauce. Continue stirring. Add your parboiled rice and mix thoroughly. Add the fried eggs while mixing. Season and add salt if necessary (careful with the salt… remember, oyster and soy sauces both contain salt).

 

Are Eggs Good For You???

The debate on eggs has been going on since the 1960s, at least, and so far, nothing seems to have changed. One week, they're OK, and the next, they're not. So what is the truth? Are eggs good for you, or not?

The latest 'study' done by Dr. J. David Spence1 was an exercise done in futility. . The 'study' purports to find that eating egg yolks is as bad for your heart as smoking. Really? This prompted further investigations. Dr. J. David Spence is a professor of neurology at the Western University Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry in London, Ont. Neurology? Not Cardiology, or Nutrition? Dr. Spence has blamed cholesterol for almost all of society’s ills… There was not one Cardiologist in the whole study? Their whole paper showed that this was no scientific study at all. There were no Control Groups, no Double-Blind procedures, and no control over variables...nothing that would qualify it as any kind of a scientific study. This is not how science is done. All the good doctor did was have 1252 patients (all smokers) that already had serious plaque issues, fill out a questionnaire that asked them how many eggs they eat per week. That's it. All Dr. Spence's conclusions came from that, a half-baked survey that didn't have any form of control.

OK. Back to the real world. How can we find out if eggs are good for you?. To start with, we have to establish that we are talking about a normal, healthy individual. People with chronic health issues may have to have special diets, which may preclude the consumption of eggs. We're not going to address those, because that is a separate issue. We're talking about average people.

We can start by establishing the fact that eggs have been a normal part of the human diet long before we were even human, or there were birds we would recognize as chickens. We know from archeological evidence that Australopithecus, Homo Habilis, Neanderthals, and Cro-Magnons all were quite accomplished nest-robbers. At some point, someone figured out it would be easier to domesticate their favorite egg-birds, instead of going out and robbing them, and the egg and poultry industry was born. Saying eggs are bad for you is like saying that gazelles are bad for lions to eat, or bananas are bad for chimpanzees. So, now we can examine the popular attitudes, and put them in context:

Myth One: Eating just the whites is healthier than the whole egg.-False. Eggs whites contain little nutrition, mostly just a little protein. And the whites contain most of the sodium, so you're not really doing yourself any favors this way. The yolk contains a lot of nutrients you can't get anywhere else, such as the amino acid leucene, pure gold for body-builders because it triggers muscle growth, and fat-burning. It has been proven in countless studies that eating whole eggs results in significant weight-loss for people who are battling obesity. Egg yolks also contain choline, vital for healthy cell membranes, and brain-function.

Myth Two: Eggs are high in cholesterol.-Neither true nor false. Eggs do contain cholesterol, but not necessarily large amounts. And studies have shown that eating cholesterol does not make your cholesterol levels go up. High cholesterol is caused by a number of factors including genetic propensity, sedentary lifestyles, obesity, and more. The fact is that you need a certain amount of cholesterol for your body to function correctly. It is a normal part of the human diet.

Myth Three: Eggs will make you fat.-False. One egg has just 70 calories. And these calories are beautifully balanced, with 6 grams of protein, and 5 grams of unsaturated fat (the kind your body is supposed to have). 5 grams isn't much for something with that much nutrition, and only 70 calories. And the protein in eggs causes a release of glucogen, a hormone that makes your body burn it's own fat stores. From a nutritional standpoint, eggs are a powerhouse. Let's compare this to another stand-by diet.....well, something that resembles food...rice cakes. Two rice cakes also have just 70 calories, but no protein or fat. What they do have is 14 grams of fat-cell cramming, high glycemic carbohydrates. You tell me...which one do you think does more good for your body?

Myth Four: Raw eggs have more nutrients.-False. First off, raw eggs are just nasty. Why would anyone want to eat them this way? Eggs cook at such a low temperature that no nutrients are damaged, at all. In fact, two of them; lutein, and zeaxanthan, are actually enhanced by cooking. On the bad side, raw eggs contain advin, an organic compound that blocks absorption of the vital nutrient biotin. Cooking renders advin chemically inert. Also, raw eggs greatly increase your chances of salmonella poisoning. Even mild cooking makes eggs perfectly safe. If you have ever seen anyone with salmonella poisoning (or had it yourself), you'll realize real quick that it isn't a lot of fun. Why in the world would anyone want to risk that when it is unnecessary, and so easy to prevent?

Myth Five: Fresh farm eggs from a local farm are better for you than store-bought eggs.-False. I enjoy getting my eggs from my local poultry farm, mostly because we socialize a lot in the process. But the eggs from the local farmer are most likely the same eggs you are buying in the store. All eggs come from farms, and chickens. And for the most part, they are all raised the same way

 

Coconut Rice served with Assorted Meat Sauce and Sautéed Vegetable Relish

Quite a number of people tend to run away from making Coconut rice because of the stress that comes with breaking the coconut and separating the shell from the coconut meat.  Then there is also the trouble that comes with grating the coconut.

For those with food processors, you can easily grind the coconut, extract the paste and strain the coconut milk using a sieve.

Those without food processors can just give the coconut to your local pepper grinder in the market. They will de-shell and grind the coconuts for you.

For this dish, I will be using the following ingredients:

Coconuts

A cup of rice

Fresh diced pepper

Chopped onion

One table spoon of Canola/Vegetable oil

Seasoning and Salt

For my assorted meat sauce, I will be using:

Fresh tomatoes

Assorted meat

Partly ripe fresh pepper (the green ones)

Tatahse

Onions

Red Oil

Cray fish

Locust beans

Smoked fish

Curry

Seasoning and salt

 

For my vegetable relish I will be using:

Cabbage

One table spoon of vegetable oil

Green beans

Tomatoes

Yellow pepper

Ginger

Onions

Carrots

Black pepper

Seasoning

You can just play around with your favorite veggies.

Firstly, use a sieve and strain the coconut milk from the coconut paste into a pot. Do not use too much water for this process as you need the coconut milk as creamy as possible. Then add your washed rice. Place the pot on your burner and bring to a boil. As soon as it starts boiling, add one (1) table spoonful of vegetable oil and reduce the flame. Allow the rice to cook through. As soon as you notice the rice is almost cooked and the liquid in the pot disappearing, add the diced pepper and chopped onions. Spread on top of the rice (please do not stir). Place the lid on the pot and allow the rice to cook for about 3-5mins. Then add your seasoning and salt. At this point, mix everything together thoroughly. Allow to cook for another 3minutes then put out the flame.

For the assorted meat sauce, roughly blend your tomatoes, tatashe and partly ripe pepper.  Cook your assorted meat till they are really soft. Heat up some red oil in a sauce pan then add your chopped onions. Stir for about 20secs then add the roughly blended mixture. Allow the mixture to fry then add your ground crayfish. At this point, you want to keep stirring to prevent your sauce from burning. Then add your locust beans followed by some curry and stir. Add the smoked fish, assorted meat and a little stock from the boiled meat.  Add Seasoning and salt and put out the flame.

For your sautéed vegetable relish, stir fry diced ginger, throw in your green beans and stir. Add your yellow and green pepper and continue stirring. Add your cabbage and some black pepper. Stir and then serve.