Into Africa

I help out with the Interact Club at school and we’ve been fund raising for a trip to Africa to help some people there. We decided to do an African flavoured dinner as part of our fund raising activities. Our dinner featured a silent auction, an African Legend, read by Rutendo, and a performance by our Djembe Drummers.

For African flavour inspiration I turned to The Soul of a New Cuisine, by Marcus Samuelsson. I love this book because it has great food ideas representing a wide range of dishes from Africa…but that’s another blog, and I’ll get to it some other time. Suffice to say that the book is full of flavour that pops! We had to adjust the recipes a bit to feed our hungry guests but I think we maintained the overall integrity of Chef Marcus’s dishes. Here’s the menu as we presented it:

Spiced Cucumber Salad with Peanuts

Citrus Cabbage Salad

Minted Mango Couscous Salad

Mixed Greens with Tamarind Vinaigrette

Sweet Corn Fufu

Vegetable Tagine with Raisins and Pine Nuts

Braised Peanut Chicken with Coconut Peanut Sauce

Grilled Boerewors Sausage with Roasted Peppers and Onion

Kofta with Okra Tomato Sauce

Avocado Fool with Mango

Peanut Cake with Papaya and Plums

Malva Pudding

Tropical Fruit and Cashew Salad

Though we tried to get as much flavour into the food as possible, I have no idea if we were successful or not. I mean, we’re not from Africa, and we’ve never been there! We go next July! But we received good reviews on the food so I guess we’ll have to wait until July to find out if we produced food that was anywhere close to what people eat in Africa. In the meantime, I think I’ll continue to experiment with African flavours, so if you know of any other books that focus on African cuisine, please let me know and I’ll give them a try.