Abak Afang Soup

Health on my mind
Hi every one. We are almost half way through 2014,  how time flies. I trust you have been doing well health wise, eating the right thing for the most part. For me, my knee was acting up actually swollen for most of last week. The doctor said I must have sprained some ligament during exercising.  It’s much better now though. Yipee I can walk better, I can wear my 3-4 inches shoes again . I don’t know what’s with me and high shoes. Well they simply do look sexy and you know what, it helps sway the hips left to right, right to left.
Now back to the main matter …our health,  I was just wondering how much difference it will make to our health if people had enough food and nutrition knowledge and practiced them . Diseases like diabetes, obesity and so on could be easily prevented. Sometimes very simple life style changes can help. For example, if more of what we eat is cooked at home we should be able to control the type of ingredients used, especially healthy ingredients and guess what, we will minimize exposure the bad stuff. Make the best of your health for the second half of this year.
Today it’s Abak Afang on the menu. It’s made from palm fruit sauce and Afang or Okazi.
Enjoy the rest of your week and thanks for stopping by.

Recipe for Abak Afang ( serves 4-6 )

Ingredients
4 cups Palm fruit sauce
1 cooking spoon Afang( pounded)
8 pieces Beef
2 segments Stock fish
Handle full smoked Prawns
Handful Periwinkles in shell ( topped and tailed) optional
4 -6 pieces Pomo( Cow skin)
Handful smoked fish
2 table spoon Crayfish ( ground)
Little piece Uyayak( adian fruit)
Pepper to taste
Seasoning to taste

Method
1, Wash, boil and pound the palm fruit, add water and squeeze out the juice. Do not make the juice too watery so that cooking time to thicken the sauce can be shortened
2, Season and steam the beef and Stockfish  and cook till soft
3, Top and tail the periwinkle and wash thoroughly. Periwinkles carry a lot of dirt.
4, Add the smoked fish, prawns, crayfish and periwinkle when the beef is almost cooked.
5,Add uyayak to the palm fruit juice and bring to boil. Pour in the meats and cook till sauce starts to thicken.Add the crayfish and cook for 3 minutes
 6, Taste and correct seasoning and pepper and cook for another 3 minutes and turn off the heat
7, Add the Afang and stir well into the sauce. No need to return to the fire .The heat from the sauce is enough to cook the Afang.
8, Serve with swallow of choice.


Cooking Tip: you may wish to cut your Afang in the market then pound at home. If you do not have a mortar you can blend the Afang coarsely in the dry ingredient  part of the blender. I prefer wash , cut  and pound my Afang at home.