the spice is right: Southern African potjiekos

This dish (pronounced poy-key-kose) is another variation of slow cooked stew, the fruits, nuts and spices adding a bit more flavour than what you may find in the West.

It is named after the three-legged iron potjie pot, originating in South Africa, but popular today in most of the southern countries. The pot retains a lot of heat, ideal for low maintenance cooking over a number of hours.

Every restaurant and home has their own recipe, most of them today using prepackaged spice mixes for this dish. You could do it with any type of curry spice, but when creating it for a restaurant in Namibia, the chef and I made this house recipe from scratch.

Crispy fish or chicken in African onion mustard sauce

While preparing to create a new menu for a restaurant in Namibia, I saw that they regularly used mustard with some common packaged spices to flavour their meats. I immediately recalled a delicious meal I learned to make with a family in Dakar, Senegal, and decided to adapt it to give the restaurant an original dish in this part of the continent.

In French, the dish is known as ‘poisson trop cuit’, meaning overcooked fish. It gives it a super crispy texture, and the way the body is scored with little squares, you can easily pick them off one at a time, enjoying them with the savoury carmelized onion sauce, the mustard enhancing its sweetness.

Chiguinha: Mozambican sweet potato peanut puree

For Africa Day, I thought I’d post a recipe using one of the most common forms of cooking vegetables, roots, and pulses in Africa: the puree. I learned this variation of chiguinha from Lucia in Maputo, for which cassava (mandioca) root can also be used in place of the sweet potato (in Southern Africa, the common sweet potato has a pinkish skin, while the inside is white).