Recettes

Moroccan Chicken Rfissa

Rfissa is chicken and lentils stewed with onions in a broth heavy with fenugreek, ras el hanout and saffron, poured over a bed of shredded msemen or trid pastry. The pastry takes up the broth and becomes the base of the dish rather than an accompaniment to it, which is what distinguishes rfissa from a tagine served with bread. It is a family dish above all else. Rfissa is what appears at reunions and at religious occasions, at what Moroccans call a zarda, and it is not a restaurant dish. Its most specific role is at childbirth: it is served to women who have recently given birth, traditionally on the third day, because fenugreek, lentils and the spice blend are held to support recovery and milk production. A dish with a fixed place in a family's most significant week carries a weight that a good stew does not. The bed underneath it has its own vocabulary. Served over crumbled harcha it becomes rfissa medhoussa; over cubed bread it is treda. Moroccan households commonly buy the trid or msemen from a souk or a local bakery rather than making it, because the pastry is the slow part and the stew is not.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

3 hrHardMorocco · Moroccan

Recette de Blessing · Africook

Chicken Curry Sauce

This is a Nigerian take on a curry sauce: chicken breast marinated in ginger, garlic and all purpose seasoning, cooked with carrots and bell peppers, and thickened with a cornstarch slurry rather than reduced or enriched with cream. Two things mark it as Nigerian rather than South Asian. The first is yaji, the suya spice built on ground peanuts, paprika, cayenne, ginger and garlic, which goes in alongside the curry powder and gives an aromatic depth no Indian curry would have. The second is the cornstarch slurry, which is how a great many Nigerian sauces are thickened, giving a glossy sauce that clings rather than a reduced one. The vegetables are meant to keep their bite. Carrots and bell peppers go in after the onion and are cooked only until slightly tender, which is characteristic of Nigerian party cooking, where texture and colour matter as much as flavour. The heat is moderate and adjustable through the scotch bonnet. Because yaji contains ground peanuts, this dish carries a peanut allergen despite nothing in its name suggesting one.

50 minEasyNigeria · African

Recette de Sobecooks · Africook

Coconut Chicken Curry

Coconut chicken curry is a one-pan dish of chicken simmered in coconut milk with a curry spice blend and whatever vegetables are to hand, broccoli, cabbage, peppers, potato, carrot. The word curry is worth being precise about. It is not a single spice or a single dish. It comes from English usage during colonial rule in India, applied broadly to spiced saucy dishes, and it now covers an enormous range of unrelated cooking across South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean and East Africa. A curry powder sold in a jar is a blend, and the blends differ substantially between manufacturers and regions. Coconut milk versions belong mainly to the coastal and tropical end of that range, southern India, Thailand, Malaysia, the Caribbean, and the Swahili coast of East Africa, where coconut is grown and used heavily. This particular recipe is a general one rather than a regional tradition, which is its strength: it tolerates substitution well and is designed to be varied. **Filed as Worldwide**, the recipe as written makes no specific national claim, so attributing it to any one cuisine would be inventing detail.

40 minEasyNigeria · American

Recette de Jennifer · Africook