African Recipes
Traditionally, African recipes consist of starchy ingredients as base. Examples of these are the cornmeal, cassava, potatoes, and yam. Typically, Africans also add a hefty amount of vegetable greens in their meals. In cooking, African recipes usually contain oil, specifically from coconut or peanut. Also, having a mostly tropical climate, Africans grow trees bearing fruit, and so they have an abundance of these food products.
Usually, Africans also add these fruits, such as coconut and banana, in their dishes. Additional food products they use are the peanut, tomato, chili, and some other spices brought by the early colonizers of the region. These are added to infuse some flavor, texture, and color to their relatively humble meals.
The African cuisine boasts of its simplicity in cooking technique and richness in flavor. After all, Africans commonly eat just steamed vegetables and other legumes, milk, whey, curds for their everyday meals. It is really easy to prepare African recipes and people must not get intimidated with how they present their dishes.
An example of a dish in the Tanzanian region is a coconut bean soup prepared with rice. The ingredients are quite simple and easy to find. It only contains onions, green peppers, curry powder, salt, butter, tomatoes, kidney beans, coconut milk, and water. You would just have to put them all in one pot wait for the beans to cook, and then add the cooked rice, and voila, an instant African dish!
Another African dish that only requires two main ingredients is the fried okra. Okra or gumbo is a pod, commonly found in Africa, which has a slimy texture. To prepare, you just have to slice the okra, place it in cold water then put in the refrigerator to cool. After some time, you can take it out and coat it with cornmeal (with a dash of salt and pepper to taste). The last step would be to fry it until golden brown.
