Bite Me!

Traditional Gambian cooking is a sloooow process.  After marketing and a quick snack of cashew fruit, we start to prepare lunch, which will take a good couple of hours to cook.  We made vegetable benachim (literally, “one pot”).  This is most often served in the Gambia with fish, but the ingredients we used were:

salt

whole peppercorns

a few cloves of garlic

one onion, roughly chopped

a handful of tomatoes

one tin (400g) of tomato puree

vegetable oil (a lot)

water

short grain white rice

three whole tamerind

two bitter tomatoes, whole (you might have trouble finding these in the UK)

one sweet potato

one cassava  (try Caribbean/African food shops for this one – they sell it in Brixton Market)

two scotch bonnets

two baby aubergines

a handful of okra

two carrots

To start with, put the oil (at least a large cupful) on the heat – in the Gambia, a small outside stove is usually used for cooking purposes, with either wood or charcoal as fuel.  While the oil is heating, pound the salt and pepper in a grinder (a normal pestle and mortar will do, if you don’t have one of the giant versions in the picture above!)  When this is ground, add the garlic and onion, then the tomatoes, and pound into a paste.   Once the oil is bubbling, add the paste, along with the tin of tomato puree and a tin.  Cook this for about twenty minutes – you should see the start to separate slightly when it’s cooked. 

In the meantime, prepare the vegetables.  Peel the cassava and sweet potato and cut into very large pieces.  Halve the baby aubergines and dice the carrots very finely.  Everything else can go in whole.  Once the tomato paste mixture is ready, add the vegetables (except the carrots) and a couple of cans of water and leave to simmer until the vegetables are ready.

While the vegetables are cooking, rinse the rice, add the finely diced carrots and steam until partly cooked.  Once the vegetables are done, take them out of the broth and keep them warm on the side.  Now add the rice to the broth and cook until all the liquid has been absorbed. 

To serve, place the rice on a large plate, and arrange the vegetables on top.  Blob the sorrel (or hibiscus) around the plate artistically. 

Now comes the fun part – eating!  If you want to observe Gambian etiquette, eat with your right hand, and make sure you only take food from the part of the plate or bowl nearest you – no reaching over.  Most Gambian families will eat all together like this, gathering around the same plate or bowl, so make sure you have one big enough!  And watch out if you don’t have asbestos fingers, as the food will be hot and if you’re greedy (like me) you can burn your fingers...

To eat, simply grab a handful of rice, and squeeze it into a solid ball in your hand.  Then chuck into your mouth.  Simples!  You will probably drop rice all over yourself if you’re not used to doing this.  If you want a bit of heat on your food, squeeze one of the scotch bonnets over your rice – don’t try and eat one, whatever you do, as they are really, really hot.  The vegetables you can just break chunks off and eat separately. 

Enjoy!

www.gambiahomecooking.com

This vegetable is something I ate a couple of times whilst in the Gambia.  It’s known locally as sorrel, but it’s not the same as sorrel in the UK.  It’s actually what we know as hibiscus - the leaves are cooked in a similar way to spinach (see below, served in a calabash), and it’s often served with benachin (see recipe above).   The hibiscus flowers are made into a tea which has medicinal properties, and also into a refreshing juice drink that tastes a little like cranberry juice.  It’s a very versatile plant!