Sampiti

My Journey to Togo…
After a couple of weeks wearing my natural hair I am  back to braids. I look forward to six weeks of not having to roast under a hair dryer or make those annoying trips to the salon on a Saturday morning when all I want to do is get my extra hours of beauty sleep or even just seat in front of the Telly and do nothing for a change.
Bukky has come to be my personal hair stylist when it comes to braids. She just understands my needs and without much instruction she always delivers what I want to carry on my head for six weeks. Bukky is from Togo and I was not going to let her go this time around without getting her to share some recipes with me. You know the regular conversation between a hair dresser and her client and this was how we drifted into me asking what foods she likes to cook and she proceeds to tell me about all the dishes in Republic of Togo where she comes from. It turns out that a lot of beans and corn is eaten in Togo. As you can guess Agonyin Beans is one of them. So it looks like I will be bringing your way quite some interesting dishes from Togo particularly those ones you can readily find the ingredients in Nigeria. So whilst the hair plating was going on I quickly organized to cook one of the dishes Bukky had described, fortunately all the ingredients were in my freezer.

This time we are making Sampiti . The main ingredients for this dish are brown beans and corn flour. You can get your corn flour from the local millers. Get the dry corn milled and sieve it to get the flour. Keep this in the freezer as you will need some from time to time. The kick here for me is that you eat this meal with your hands. This is one dish I think will be interesting for older folks or very little kids because of the texture. I enjoyed it so much with some pepper sauce. But again I had to drink lots of water after. Looks like the corn continues to absorb water and so make one thirsty.
Enjoy my offering today.

Recipe

Ingredients
1 cup Brown Beans
2 cups  Maize Flour
2 pieces Shawa (large smoked Herring)
8-10 pieces smoked Prawns
1 whole Onion
Scotch Bonnet Pepper to taste
3 cloves Garlic
1/2 little finger Fresh Ginger
Seasoning to taste
2 cooking spoons Palm oil
4 cups water to boil beans
4 cups of water to cook corn flour
Salt to taste

Method
1. Wash and boil the beans till soft with little water remaining
2. Blend the pepper,onion,ginger and garlic and set aside
3. Dry fry the corn flour till light brown and set aside to cool
4. Add 4 cups of water to the beans pot and bring to boil, add the pepper/ onion blend, prawns , fish ,seasoning cube and salt to taste. Boil for about 10 minutes. Taste to correct the seasoning.
5. Add the roasted corn flour and palm , cover the pot oil and allow about 2 minutes for the pottage to boil to the top.
6. Using a wooden spoon mix the corn powder well into the beans until all the corn powder mixes well and there is no more white corn powder showing. If you want you may add just 1/2 a cup of water to make the pottage soft . The texture of this dish is like soft pounded yam.
7. Serve hot with some Pepper sauce if you like.