Nshima and relish.

This post is for the Zambian friends really, or anyone with food curiosities. From time to time I get a craving for the food that I grew up eating; cassava root nshima and relish of any form i.e. stew or vegetables. I wrote about cassava nshima quite extensively in a previous blog so I won't repeat myself (if you are interested it is in a blog entry about Beef Stew quite a while back, possibly even last year ) again, I just wanted to put up some photos and share the joy!

This is what the nshima looks like. You break off bite size pieces at a time from the main pile. I am not the best at 'hondering'/making nshima but I try, if I were more efficient there wouldn't be any tiny white bits left to see as the flour would have been incorporated properly. Showing my short comings is worth sharing a new food. 

I chose to make cabbage with peanuts and tomatoes and onions this time. It is rather difficult finding authentic leaves etc to cook but these were some things I ate a lot of back home. We also ate a lot of wild mushrooms, none that you even hear of in the 'Western world'. I suppose I would cook some oyster mushrooms as a comparison purely for their 'slimy' texture. In Zambia some mushrooms grew so big that small children could literally use them as an umbrella, insane! (Infact, having just done it out of curiosity, if you Google 'Zambian girl holding a giant mushroom' you will see an image as proof of these large fungi, and the one in the picture is a lot smaller than some I have seen!).

Anyway, cabbage and peanuts. You start with frying some onion then you add to that finely sliced cabbage and a small bit of water to allow it to steam/boil, instead of using more oil and letting it all fry. Once it is part way cooked you are ready to add the peanuts. Back in Zambia we would have pounded some ground nuts up to use but here I just use crunchy peanut butter, you get the flavour and also some peanut pieces. So for about 1/3-1/2 of a cabbage I used 2 scoops of peanut butter, scoops with a dessert/cereal spoon. Mix it into the water and all through the cabbage and let it cook down. The dish can take a good cooking, over half an hr, to get it nice and soft. You don't want much excess liquid so be careful with how much you add, just enough to keep it cooking and from burning. Keep the lid on the pan whilst cooking too. At the same time I made the tomato and onions. You can easily peel tomatoes by pouring boiling water over them and leaving them for a few minutes. Then making a small incision in the skin. Grab hold of the peel and it should just tear away in your hands. Fry up some finely chopped onion then add chopped, peeled tomatoes (I used vine tomatoes because they were on sale and they tasted amazing!) and let it all cook down together. Add some course salt and a touch of water if it gets too thick and again this dish can be cooked for a while too. And my meal was ready. Nshima with relish. A taste of nostalgia! Very happy me!