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One of the best things about traveling has to be trying new food. When you actually live in another country you get to learn how to cook all these fabulous dishes. The past two weeks we have done South African dinners for both of our home churches (New Covenant Fellowship and The Worship Center) and it was so fun!
We cooked up a few of South Africa’s famous dishes for about 100 of our friends and supporters. Thank you to everyone that came and ate! For those of you that missed these times, here is a sampling of what we had. A lot of what we cooked was with ingredients brought over from South Africa.
First was Rice, hopefully you’ve seen this exotic food before!
Then we had Pap (Ugali for those of you in East Africa). Pap is a staple food all over Eastern and Southern Africa. It is made with dried white corn flour which is cooked with water until it forms a stiff pile of goodness. It takes some muscle to constantly stir this with a wooden spoon!
On top of these two starches was Babootie. Babootie is a Cape Town curry dish made with ground beef and baked with egg on top. It is our son, Garett’s, absolute favorite meal.
With that is a common African salad made with tomatoes, red onions and cucumbers. A little vinegar and salt is added to it and that is it. There is no Hidden Valley Ranch in Africa and with food like this, we don’t miss it (although my husband might disagree:).
For dessert we had Malva pudding, a simple white cake soaked in a sweet syrupy sauce. Delicious!
To drink with that is Rooibos tea. Rooibos means “Red Bush” and is an indeginous tea to South Africa. We brought it from South Africa because the American version is just not the same. Normally people drink it with a little bit of milk and maybe some sugar.
So there you go! We cooked, we ate and we were full. Hopefully if you joined us, you enjoyed trying something new!
A number of people have asked me for some recipes so I am going to put them here. I have put the Babootie and the Malva Pudding recipe up.
For the Babootie, I had to write down a recipe out of something I just cook intuitively. That basically means that I took my best guess as to what amounts of stuff I put in. I’m sure yours will turn out fine. If you do make these please e-mail us and let us know how it goes. If you have questions also e-mail us and just ask.
I hope you enjoyed the virtual culinary traveling!
Recipes:
Malva Pudding
Babootie
(In order to download these recipes in .PDF format, right-click on each link. For Microsoft Internet Explorer choose “save target as”, for Firefox choose “save link as”)
Alternately, you can cut and paste the recipes from this page.
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