Week 67. Equatorial Guinea. Hot Chicken Paella.

Blogging is so glamorous. It’s currently 6:30am and I’m sitting in the dark. I’ve had 5 hours sleep and my throat burns as for those 5 hours I must have snored. I’ve just had to whisper-shout at my three year old for making a tower out of a load of bottles and then knocking them over (sounded like a bomb). I’ve also left my glasses upstairs but don’t want to get them as I’ll likely wake my wife and three month old up and as a result I’m getting a little bit more of a headache each line I write.  Glam.

In recent weeks I have…..hold on.

FFS. I just had to pause writing this as my son just demanded that the cereal bowl I had dumped on his little table be taken off and then only put back when I had put down a place mat. This has to be a joke. He is bloody three…what’s he going to be like when he is 6? Demanding I put sparkling water next to his bed and ensuring his room always smells of lavender? Jesus.

Three year olds. Wow. Intelligent enough to con you, stupid enough to get lost in supermarkets. We are currently in the question stage. Supposedly at the age of three a child asks 200 questions a day. I think our one asking about 15,000. “Why Joe?” he asks non stop. He has decided it’s funny to use my real name not Daddy. I hate it, so he uses it more. What he doesn’t know is that every time he uses it I eat one of his sweets from the cupboard. In your face little boy.

Anyway – back to my blog. I’ve had a cup of tea now and whilst my throat is still screwed, I do feel semi alive.

This blog has been going for two years now. I’m 67 dishes in, but there are some  powerhouses of world cuisine I haven’t reached yet. I’ve not cooked China or Japan or Italy or Spain. I’ve not had to choose what to cook from the vast USA, nor have I had to decide what to cook from my wife’s home country of New Zealand or my home country (England). There is a lot more to do but for now its a case of doing the legwork and there are 47 countries in Africa which need cooking at some point.

This week it was Equatorial Guinea which is a tiny country on the West of Africa and unsurprisingly on the Equator! What you probably didn’t know about it, is that it is the richest per capita in the whole of Africa (although extremely unbalanced in its distribution). With many Spanish influences I decided that their version of Paella was the dish for me. My loose knowledge of Paella is that whilst these days it’s known as a seafood dish, it was originally made with rabbit and was a Spanish peasant dish. In Equatorial Guinea the recipes I found were also not seafood but used Chicken or Guinea Fowl. I chose chicken.

The main difference I could tell between the dish I cooked and its Spanish cousin is that my Paella had chilli in it and more beans – the rest was largely the same. It’s delicious and easy to make.

Ingredients (for 4).

• 2 cups Paella rice
• 1 Large Onion
• 3 cloves garlic
• 4 chopped tomatoes (skin off)
• Pinch Saffron
• Pinch Oregano
• Fresh Chilli (you choose how much)
• Chicken Stock (2-3 pints)
• White Wine – 1 Cup
• 4 Chicken Breasts

 

Chop the onion and garlic and fry gently in some oil.

After they begin to brown add the herbs and a large pinch of salt and stir for 30 seconds before adding the tomato and chilli.

Let that all sweat for a few minutes before adding the rice and stirring it all in.

Let this all simmer gently for a couple of minutes. The rice will quickly absorb the juice in the pan so then add the chicken stock.

This should then all simmer for 20-30 minutes. It is done when there is no liquid left and the rice is plump. Whilst the rice simmers grill or BBQ the chicken breasts.

 

Week 64. Laos. Kalee Ped

For anyone who reads this occasionally or even regularly, you might have noticed I haven’t posted for 8 or so weeks. Life has prevented me  – but for lovely reasons. I am now a father of not just a crazy 3 year old boy, but now a little squirmy girl (Olive). She was born on the 8^th of May and for the past few weeks rather than chilling out in the kitchen we have been concentrating on making her grow.

Everyone we spoke to who have two or more children explained in detail how it would be intense – and they were right. I could fit both of my children in a very small box, but between them they eat up all of our time. Last weekend the theory was that I could do a post, but then we had FOUR children’s parties to go to. Between breakfast on Saturday and breakfast on Monday morning all I ate was food I picked off Henry’s plates at each of his parties. I felt disgusting.

Slowly, slowly, we are getting our heads around managing time and me cooking a dish from Laos is a good step forward.

This is how the Lonely Planet describes the country:

“After years of war and isolation, Southeast Asia’s most pristine environment, intact cultures and quite possibly the most chilled-out people on earth mean destination Laos is fast earning cult status among travellers. It is developing quickly but still has much of the tradition that has sadly disappeared elsewhere in the region. Village life is refreshingly simple and even in Vientiane it’s hard to believe this sort of languid riverfront life exists in a national capital. Then, of course, there is the historic royal city of Luang Prabang, where watching as hundreds of saffron-robed monks move silently among centuries-old monasteries is as romantic a scene as you’ll experience anywhere in Asia.

Read more: http://www.lonelyplanet.com/laos#ixzz200lxTGv1”

My wife travelled there on her whistle-stop dash across the world from New Zealand to meeting me and filling that box full of children. She rated it incredibly highly.

Cuisine wise it is not too dissimilar to that of Thailand and I chose to make a spicy red duck curry. Duck is an ingredient that I would often order when at a Thai restaurant, but very rarely think to use it at home. After making this dish I will do much more often.

There are two ways to make this dish. One is the complicated way where you make your own red curry paste and the other is to buy a good quality paste and then supplementing the flavour. I made my own using this  bit.ly/cQaG8H – but it’s up to you.

Ingredients:

• 2/3 Tbsp Red Curry Paste
• 350g Coconut Milk
• 500g Duck
• 2 Lemongrass Sticks
• 1 Large Bunch Coriander
• 2 Birds Eye Chillies
• 2 Cloves Garlic
• Tbsp Fish Sauce
• 1 Large Onion or 3 Shallots
• 1 Tbsp Tomato Puree

Fry the diced onion and garlic in some oil in a large pan or wok for 3 minutes. Don’t burn it.

Add in 1 lemongrass stick and both chillies.

After a few minutes add in half the coriander, the fish sauce, the red curry paste, the puree and the coconut milk.

Let it all slowly bubble away for 15 minutes and then add the duck. Poach it for 10 minutes and finally add in the coriander and the lemongrass

Serve with rice.

Week 60. Norway. Eplepai.

In six weeks I will be father to a second child. There is a horrible possibility that this child will enter the world, not in a hospital, but in my house. We went to the hospital today to be told that the trend is to have the most-part of the labour at home and then to move, later, to hospital. However, if the lady doesn’t like the idea of horrific contractions in the car then they push on and deliver at home.  I know my wife would rather be ripped open with a butter knife and have me pull the baby out than get in the car when contracting and therefore I am probably going to be faced with the carnage of a baby entering life in our house. I can’t think of anything worse.

“Oh, but it’s so natural Joe” I keep getting told. “What’s more normal than being at home and bringing a child into the world” is another comment I heard a lot of today. What are they bloody thinking?! It’s completely abnormal for a child to be born in my lounge or on my bed or in the bathroom. I can safely say that this didn’t happen once last week, last month or for as long as I have known this house……so how exactly is that normal? Everyone has lost the plot.

This is what gets said in hospitals post birth:

“Joe and Des, congratulations, you two just spend some time with your new born; we will take care of the mess. Enjoy this wonderful time”.

This is what gets said at home

“Joe you are going to have to nip off to Tesco, we are all out of Kitchen Towel and there is a hell of a mess over here on the floor and the walls which you need to sort out”.

Let me add another reason for me to think this idea is lunacy. We live on a small terraced street in which people have their bedrooms at the front of the house. On a Monday morning between 2 and 3am there is a Milk Float which delivers to number 2. It’s one of those quiet electric floats, but it wakes the entire street up. When foxes make noise on the street there are usually a few of us in the street chasing them off. We are going to have to contemplate the thought of having a baby in the middle of the night in our quiet road and it’s going to cause mayhem. My guess is there are 5 police vans outside our house with armed police in them in minutes as everyone will think I am murdering my wife, slowly carving her to pieces whilst she whimpers, occasionally screaming as I remove her fingers.

I’ll let you know how that one pans out.

Dish wise I wanted to do a dessert this week and when looking online the cake which came up most was a Norwegian Wedding cake, so I looked to the second most popular and this dish is related to one of the funniest moments in my life.

In 2009 most of my family came to New Zealand with Des and I (she is a Kiwi) to do some travelling and catch up with the in-laws. We were in Wanaka, which is a beautiful lake town in the South Island. Des went into a shop and they said to her how we had to go to a hotel called the Cardrona as it sells the best Duck Jackal Pie in the world. We were intrigued. What was Duck Jackal Pie? It sounded magical. Was it sweet, was it savoury? So we trekked off to The Cardrona and upon arriving asked the waitress if we could have some the pie. She looked at us completely confused and then suddenly a smile ripped across her face and she burst into laughter

“Oh, oh this is so funny” she said. “You don’t mean Duck Jackal Pie, you want DUTCH APPLE PIE!!”

We laughed until we were sick and then wolfed down the wonderful pie.

I’ve made many apple pies before, but I’ve not used large quantities of almond in it before and I’ve not baked it like a cake. This is very much between a cake and a pie. It rises (slightly) like a cake, it has no pastry like a cake, but it resembles a pie. It’s freaking delicious. It is relatively simple to make and I’d recommend it as a dessert with ice cream after a heavy meal – as it is sweet and light.

Recipe:

• 5 Apples (3 for the topping and 2 for the innards)
• 3 Tbsp Milk
• 1 Cup Castor Sugar
• 1 Egg
• 1 TBSP Vanilla Essence
• 1 Tsp Baking Powder
• 1/2 Tsp Salt
• 1/s Tsp Cinnamon
• 3/4 Cup Plain Flour
• 1/2 Cup Chopped Almonds
• 2 TBSP Butter

1. Heat the oven to 180 degrees centigrade
2. Core and skin all apples and chop 3 delicately in paper slices for the topping
3. Mix all the ingredients apart from the apples for the topping and pour into a greased 7 inch cake dish
4. Add the topping apples, spreading them from the outside in
5. Bake for 30 mins
6. Brush the butter (melted) onto the top
7. Bake for a further 30 mins.

Done. Here is the Cardrona hotel

 

Week 47. Slovakia. Detvianska Nátura

For any keen observers you might have noticed an unexpected three week gab between blog posts. I won’t go into the detail but life dealt a pretty tough blow which took a little time to get through. We are getting life back on track now so it is time to look back at normality. What this time did teach me is that there can be times when life just seems irrationally unfair, but that is not down to anything more than the science behind why we are here. We are not powerful enough to change anything major. Yes we can tweak things a bit by making sure people live a bit longer, but ultimately there is no point worrying about the major outcomes in life as we can’t influence them. What we can influence is what we do at the moment, how we strive for the future and what legacy we will leave our own families, as our legacy could be far more important than what we do during our life.

My legacy will likely not be this blog, but it could well be a part of what made me up and if the determination of me getting every country cooked is a trait which people will look up at, then maybe it could be a part of me.

I have been to Slovakia before. It was a stag-party in 2005. 30 naïve boys in their mid-twenties descended upon Bratislava. We hadn’t been to a stag-party before and therefore were likely driven by stories we had heard of the antics which befell such an occasion. As a result we played the weekend like parody of a group of idiots on a weekend away. We stayed on a boat on the Danube, stayed up until 5am each night and had two hours sleep. We shot guns in a horrifically unsafe environ, we go carted, we drank FAR too much and we threw up. We also all dressed up. We were horrible people for 3 days. From what I can remember of Bratislava it had a very Soviet feel to it from the 1980s. It was unpainted concrete grey with the bulging and ugly Danube cutting through the centre. There were supposedly beautiful areas, which we didn’t see, and instead we saw most of the places which made us think that the Quentin Tarantino film Hostel was very easy to imagine true.

As I have grown older I feel really bad to have the impression of Slovakia that I do and I am certain there is a side to the country which I did not see, but I just didn’t get a chance to see it. I would love the opportunity to go back and bolt a better memory of the country into my mind.

As I feel this way I decided to cook a dish which represented a different side of the country, a side I haven’t seen and a side I want to. I therefore chose Detvianska Natura, which can be translated to Detva’s Temper. It is called so, as it represents a city called Detva in the midst of Slovakia. It is known as “the temper” as the region is known for its hardy men who love their spicy food.

The make-up of the dish is very simple but the bite is strong. It meets my palate as I love the combination of paprika, mustard, horseradish and the cool potato base. It made me picture a hulk of a farmer returning from a day’s hard graft and needed to be filled quickly but not with any bland nonsense.

I would suggest cooking it on a very cold dark night when you need some sustenance which wouldn’t let you down with its meekness. A night when you think you would like something with mashed potato with it, but the Jalapeno jar in the fridge is also calling your name.

This week I have not a huge amount on; apart from preparing the house for my lovely wife’s return from New Zealand and preparing my sleep patterns again for the Rugby World Cup Semi Finals next weekend. I hope you have been enjoying it as much as I have.

Here is the recipe. Have a good week.

To make the meat dish you will see that you need to dice all the ingredients lengthway.

• Start by cooking the onion for about 5 mins.
• Add the pork and cook for 5 more.
• Add the paprika, cayenne, ketchup and mustard and horseradish and cook until it is starting to look slightly too dry.
• Add all remaining ingredients and cook for 5-10 minutes.
• Add to the top of a potato cake. I chose to make a plate of potato cake.

Ingredients.

• 400g Pork Steak
• 1 Bell Pepper
• 1 Onion
• 250g Mushrooms
• 1 Bell Tomato
• Chillies to taste (don’t be soft on them)
• 1 Tbsp Paprika
• 1 Tsp Cayenne Pepper
• 2 TBSP Tomato Ketchup
• 1 TBSP Mustard
• 1 TBSP Horseradish

Week 35. Niger. Caakiri

Mrs Jones and little Master Jones have headed back to New Zealand for a few weeks. As they left I looked through the list of things I was given to be getting on with in their absence:

1. Sort out Garden. What does that even mean? It looks fine. Maybe I should move some bits about.
2. Put shelves up in Bedroom.  Well that’s a weekend down the drain.
3. Ebay all our crap.  This is flawed. I have to decide what is crap, which I could very easily get wrong and end up selling something she needs/ wants/ loves. This is a dog of a task.
4. Mend the wall in the kitchen where the paint keeps falling off. I haven’t even the first clue how to do this.
5. Don’t spend all of the joint account. That’s rich!

What I don’t see on the list is “Go out every night, have fun and get some lie-ins in the bag”. Fortunately I do know that she would be very happy for me to do this, so I have got stuck in. Unfortunately the lie-ins didn’t materialise as I wake each morning at the same time irrespective of what time I put my head down so I was a little sluggish at work today and couldn’t wait to get home to cook a comforting dish.

Week 33. Djibouti. Skoudekharis.

We know people living in Christchurch and whilst they are all safe, it has certainly been a traumatic week. Watching events unfold on TV struck me how we, in the Western World,  weight our media coverage so heavily on fellow Westerners. The coverage has been extensive of NZ, as it should be, but I do wonder if we move on too quickly from the disasters in remote parts of the world. The earthquake in New Zealand will likely have taken 400 lives when the final counts are made, and whilst this is horrific it merely scratches the surface of the devastation caused in Haiti (230,000 deaths) last year. Had the quake in NZ registered in 2010, the death toll would have been only fifth behind tragedies in China, Chile, Indonesia and of course Haiti. What I am getting at is that whilst we must think of those who are affected by the quake in Canterbury, lets not forget those who are still being affected by previous devastation.

I drew Djibouti this week which took me into Africa for the first time in 2011. Djibouti is on the East Coast and one of the least populated countries on the continent. It is tiny (in the context of Africa) and borders in my opinion one of the top 3 scariest countries in the world…..Somalia. I will save my comments for when I draw Somalia, but for now think  lawlessness, open fighting, dusty cities and Pirates driving around in £50,000 Range Rovers.

Week 18. Mauritius. Cassoulet Mauricien.

The house feels empty without them and I have developed severe OCD.

Ever since my wife and son jetted off to New Zealand for a few weeks I’ve been rushing about the house like a mad-man. For the time being I don’t have to spend my time concentrating on keeping a toddler from serious injury so my attention has turned to the tiny imperfections in our house. I’ve been cleaning toasters, washing walls, cleaning windows, re-touching areas where a flake of paint had come off. I’ve lost the bleeding plot! I assume I’m “trying to keep busy” but I feel very relaxed about them being away; instead I think I am a bit of a nutter who can’t sit still.

Do you like Raw Oysters? A Poll

Its oyster season in the UK and from now until April our native oysters will be plucked out of the sea and devoured. I would be interested to see how many will be swallowed and how many will be spat out in disgust, as they are, for sure, an acquired taste.

Week 5. Gambia. Superkanja.

I gave myself a really interesting challenge as to how to choose the country this week, as I wanted Henry to choose as it is his first birthday on Thursday. The issue being that Henry is yet to speak and therefore how do you have a 1 year old choose from a list (held on my PC) when holding his attention for more than a second or two is challenge enough. I started by giving him a number of bricks with numbers on and have him pick them, but when he picked up ’4′ I didn’t know whether to stop there or let him pick another which would get us into the forties. So, to resolve things, I took a different tack. I popped him on my lap and put his finger on the down arrow and as the cursor flew down my list I would take the number corresponding to when he took his finger off. Attempt one was a disaster as he didn’t remove it until we had flown past the end of the country list, but attempt two was far more successful and he stopped at GAMBIA!