African Food & Hot Fudge Pudding

red penne

I can't tell you how sad I am that summer is over. Isabel started high school a two weeks ago and yesterday morning Owen strapped on his 50-pound backpack, picked up his giant trombone, and set off down the hill to the middle school whence he emerged seven hours later cheerful and full of stories, but looking a little stunned. An hour later he fell apart because he had already lost his homework planner and he was sure he was going to be sentenced to eternal detention. "They're really strict about that in middle school!" he cried. I told him I thought the teachers would have compassion in the first week of school and that if they didn't I would homeschool him (?), but that meanwhile he really needed to figure out how to pay attention to his belongings. Then I left him disconsolate under a mountain of school supplies and drove Isabel to dance class.

Over the summer I thought I had outgrown my taste for alcohol. I thought, what an unexpected and wholesome development!

Yes, well. Cheers.

Three African dinners to report on:

1. Red penne. A lustrous pasta sauced with harissa (pepper paste) and ground almonds from Soul of a New Cuisine. Marcus Samuelsson likens it to pesto, which it somewhat resembles, except spicier and red. It is very delicious, though not quite as delicious as pesto. Another solid recipe from that very solid book.

2. I've been testing recipes from Marcus Samuelsson's Soul of a New Cuisine against the same recipes from The Africa News Cookbook. I was secretly rooting for the humble spiral-bound Africa News over the shiny chef's book, but the chef's book easily wins this round. The bobotie (Malay-inspired ground meat curry) from Soul of a New Cuisine was tender and fragrant. The bobotie from Africa News dried out in the baking so the top formed a mahogany brown crust studded with puffy burned raisins. I have spared you the photograph. To accompany, I made the buttery Africa News yellow rice which we liked, but which couldn't really compete with Samuelsson's "fancy" yellow rice, full of mango, yellow tomato, expensive saffron and corn on the cob. Not a fair fight, but Samuelsson still wins.

pretty and humble

3. Thursday night, I made Samuelsson's doro wett, an Ethiopian chicken stew with hard-boiled eggs. I hoped to present it, as he recommends, with a big plate of injera, the sour, soft, spongy flatbread that serves, in the course of an Ethiopian meal, as a platter, a utensil, and a tangy starch. I've only ever tasted injera in Ethiopian restaurants and it's the main reason I love going to Ethiopian restaurants. I had read disparaging reviews of Marcus Samuelsson's injera recipe and I am sorry to report that the naysayers were correct. His recipe calls for whole wheat flour, club soda, baking soda, and yogurt and yields a large brown pancake that is very tasty, but in no way resembles injera. It seemed much too easy and was. I am going to learn to make proper injera if it takes me the rest of the year.

Pass the maple syrup.

On another subject, I haven't been able to throw away any of my mother's clipped recipes and they sit n stacks and binders and files around the house. I have all my late grandmother's recipes too, and while I know that to keep them is silly, I think it's a benign kind of silliness, like keeping too many measuring spoons. No. It's better than benign. It makes me happy. When I look at my mother's and grandmother's recipe collections, I see those two women at their most youthful and hopeful. Recipe clipping and collecting is such an optimistic gesture, full of the expectation that there will be many days to come in which you will prepare and partake of braided holiday breads, homemade marshmallow eggs, oven-fried chicken, hot fudge pudding.

The following recipe for hot fudge pudding was at the top of one of my mother's stacks. I'm pretty sure she never made it. Clipped from the San Francisco Chronicle in 2003, it's one of those wacky recipes that has you mix ordinary cake ingredients and then pour hot water over everything to make a horrendous mudpie that miraculously bakes into something coherent and wonderful. It is super-easy and calls for ingredients you might actually have in the cupboard right now.

Homely, but so good

HOT FUDGE PUDDING

1 cup flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
3/4 cup sugar
6 tablespoons cocoa
1/2 cup milk
2 tablespoons melted butter
1 cup chopped nuts (I used almonds)
1 cup light brown sugar
1 3/4 cups hot water

1. Heat oven to 350 degrees F and butter a 9-inch square pan.

2. Sift flour, baking powder, sugar, and 2 tablespoons of the cocoa into a mixing bowl. Stir in milk, butter and nuts.

3. Spread the batter in the pan. Mix together the brown sugar and remaining cocoa and spread over the batter. Pour the hot water over everything.

4. Bake for 45 minutes. Serve warm with whipped cream or ice cream.

It reheats well.  Last night, since the homework hasn't kicked in for real, Owen and I sat on the sofa and ate leftover pudding and watched The Gods Must Be Crazy, which I remembered as hilarious but is actually awful. Owen loved it, though, and told me he wished he was a Bushman.

They aren't okra fans

 South African hot dish

I miss Africa. It reminded me of Wyoming, but with elephants, and I've been missing Wyoming my entire life. The other night I watched a movie called White Material, the kind of movie that made me never, ever want to go to Africa before I went to Africa. Like Hotel Rwanda.

But having been to Africa, I completely understood why Isabelle Huppert did what she did in order to stay on her plantation, despite the bad men with guns, child soldiers with machetes, and a decapitated ram's head left in her coffee beans. It wasn't pretty, but I understood.

I didn't think much about food when I was in Africa, not because the food wasn't delicious but because food in Africa is dwarfed by everything else. It is dwarfed by the trees full of baboons and the vast plains, the hippos and lions and giraffes and monkeys trying to get in your room, by the waterfalls and rivers, and, of course, the problems. It seems frivolous to talk about African cooking rather than African poverty, political instability, AIDS, and rhinoceros poaching.

Yet if all that you feel comfortable discussing about a place are its noble landscapes and problems, the place is no longer relatable and human. African food is wonderful. The food served to tourists, anyway, which is the only kind I ate or had the opportunity to eat. I realize this is not what ordinary Africans eat, but is still African food: food cooked by Africans in Africa using African recipes and African ingredients. It did not taste like any food I had ever eaten before.

African food, in my brief and very limited experience, is strong and spicy and hearty, often served with pap, a starchy cornmeal porridge much like polenta, but not cheesy or buttery. We ate a lot of this porridge alongside curry-like stews accompanied by chutneys and incendiary pepper pastes. (A creamy spinach-peanut braise served with some porridge was the best thing I ate the entire trip, and I am determined to replicate it at home.) I worry that some of the flavors will be impossible to capture here -- the beef tasted different and better than American beef, and I ate a butter cookie that tasted 10 times better than any butter cookie I ever encountered in my many decades of butter cookie consumption. I started thinking maybe it was made with cape buffalo butter after someone told me they make cheese out of cape buffalo milk. It is a brave man or woman who tries to milk a cape buffalo.

Anyway, when I got home, I immediately opened The Soul of a New Cuisine by Marcus Samuelsson to learn more about African cooking.

This is a beautiful and inspiring cookbook, full of gorgeous pictures and tempting dishes, but it is very high end and cheffy, with recipes for things like quail-foie gras soup and tangerine consomme. Tangerine consomme sounds lovely, but it doesn't sound African to me. Amazon reviews of the book are mixed, as are the notes from Eat Your Books. I am especially discouraged by a thumbs-down report on Samuelsson's injera recipe as I am determined to learn to make injera.

Then I pulled out The Africa News Cookbook, which I bought some years ago. I can't remember why.

It is a homely looking spiral-bound cookbook, lacking lush photography or lavish recipes. Amazon reviews of this book are outstanding.

My plan is to cook a few dishes from Samuelsson's book this week and then cook similar dishes from Africa News next week, and choose the cookbook to proceed with on that basis.

I started cooking from Soul of a New Cuisine a few nights ago. Results so far:

1.  My father came over on Saturday and I made bobotie (see photo on top.) Bobotie is essentially South African hot dish, an easy and frugal everyday casserole of spiced ground meat topped with custard. This recipe was excellent and I kept eating even after I was full. It was that kind of excellent. I served the bobotie with an easy mango sambal -- a.k.a. relish -- from Samuelsson's book and some creamed chard. Dinner was a big hit. For dessert, Isabel made turtle bars from an Alice Medrich recipe that you can find here. (You should bake these immediately; they are that kind of excellent, too.)

sweet

2. Monday, I made Samuelsson's Jollof rice and it was gummy, dark, spicy, and studded with peas -- a one pot arroz con pollo.  Owen: "I thought it was good. Not make-it-every-night good, but it seems nice for once a month." Isabel: "I thought the chicken was good but the rice had too much stuff in it." Husband: "The chicken would be better if it didn't have any bones in it."

Jollof rice

3. Tuesday night, I made Samuelsson's kofta meatballs with okra tomato sauce.  I had expected meatballs with a little sauce that you could serve on a plate, but ended up with a viscous okra soup in which floated big, tender meatballs. It was gumbo-like and I loved it. I was alone. Isabel: "The meatballs would have been better by themselves." Husband: "I thought it needed a noodle in it. The okra is a little bit off-putting." Owen: "I liked the flavor of the meat, but that vegetable is not the kind of taste that I like."

He misses Africa too.