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Recipes
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Gages is a Sierra Leonean aubergine and tomato salad, marinated in vinegar and oil and finished with flaked coconut and roasted peanuts just before serving. The aubergine is fried in butter first, which is what separates it from a raw salad.
The structure is a marinated salad rather than a cooked dish, and the long chill is where the work happens. Three hours minimum, and overnight is better, lets the vinegar and oil work into the fried aubergine and the raw tomato and onion soften slightly without losing their shape. It is one of very few African dishes served genuinely cold.
Coconut and peanuts go on at the last moment and are the point of the dish. Both go soft within minutes of meeting the dressing, so adding them early loses the crunch that the whole thing is built around. Both are staples of Sierra Leonean cooking, where groundnuts appear in everything from stews to snacks and coconut grows along the coast. Because of the peanuts and the butter, this is neither vegan nor peanut-free, which the ingredient list makes clear but the name does not.
Oyster mushrooms grilled and tossed in suya spice. It is a plant-based version of the Nigerian street food, and it works better than most meat substitutions do.
**The traditional suya spice contains ground peanuts, and this recipe includes them.** The source flags it and offers to leave them out, which is honest, but it is worth stating clearly, because a peanut allergy and a suya spice blend are a genuinely dangerous combination and the name gives no warning.
Suya proper is skewered beef, ram or chicken rubbed in yaji, the spice blend of ground roasted peanuts, ginger, cayenne, garlic, onion powder and paprika, and grilled over open coals. It is Hausa in origin, from northern Nigeria, and it is sold across Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger, Ghana and parts of Sudan. Kyinkyinga is the Ghanaian name, agashe the Sudanese.
Oyster mushrooms are the right substitution and not an arbitrary one. Shredded, they have a fibrous, layered structure that genuinely resembles pulled meat, they take on the dry rub readily, and they char well. Most vegetables do neither.
The source's method is very compressed, one step reads "put in a preheated medium", with the word oven missing, and has been filled out below.
Dietary tags are provided by contributors as a guide, not verified by AFN, and they depend on the products you buy. If you have a serious allergy, check every ingredient yourself. Cooking, allergies and your own judgement