Angola, another of those African countries that make you wonder if there’s any hope for Africa. It was torn by bitter civil war from 1975 to 2002 (can you imagine living in a country at war for 17 years? And no, living in America in 2018 as it enters its 17th year in Afghanistan doesn’t count – we are talking internal, civil war) and is still one of the lowest rated African nations in terms of governance. Being the second largest petroleum and diamond producer in sub-Saharan Africe just means there are riches for the plundering, with no incentive to develop its human resources. Ah, the curse of rich natural resources.
Okay, enough about Angola as a country. There are a few dishes that are specific to Angola rather than to the general Congo area, and one of them is the chicken dish Muamba de Galinha – recipe here or here.
One of the key ingredients is red palm oil, which we’d never heard of. We couldn’t find it at King Soopers or Sprouts or Vitamin Cottage or Safeway or the Asian Market. Whole Foods had a 16 oz jar for $14 which we ended up buying, but then discovered that India’s Grocery could get it for half the price, so we ordered some and returned the Whole Foods jar. The palm oil from India’s Grocery turned out to be from Ghana so we felt very virtuous, getting a more authentic palm oil than one made in California. Strangely, it’s solid at room temperature and we had to immerse the bottle in a bath of hot water to liquify it so we could pour it.
The recipe consists mainly of chicken, palm oil, onion, tomatoes, squash or eggplant (we went with eggplant) and lots of okra. It also called for palm soup base but we couldn’t find that anywhere so had to do without it. Chicken recipes are interesting for two reasons. First, the recipes we’ve made all seem to call for chicken to be cooked for far too long – in this case at least 45 minutes, which would way overcook the chicken – or at least the chicken we cook. The other reason is that the chicken we get is probably very different to the chicken they would have in a country like Angola. I imagine that Angolan chickens are scrawny little things, whereas here our chicken is bred and genetically manipulated to grow fast and have huge breasts and no bones – or at least the chicken we get in the supermarket is all breast and no bones.
There’s not much to say about the cooking of the dish other than that we added the chicken much later than the recipe calls for as we didn’t want it getting tough.
A friend had recommended watching Food, Inc., so we decided to eat in front of the TV and watch the DVD. By the end of the movie we a) felt disgusted at the food industry and its practices, b) were pissed off with Monsanto, c) felt powerless in the face of our government’s corrupt relationship with the food industry, and d) decided to spend the extra money to buy organic. Interestingly, the same evening I was looking at the New York Times pages and saw Maria Calman’s latest And The Pursuit of Happiness column, Back to the Land, which uses Thanksgiving to talk about how we eat. She concludes with:
The United States of America could be less fastly fastly and more slowly slowly. We could think small and shift to a new (old) way of growing food and eating and being. Something that would make the Founders happy.
Sounds interesting. Can’t wait to join in on the cooking!
Yes to organic food and yes, Monsanto is the devil. Allison came home from school one day last year with this tidbit of information. Ah you gotta love Boulder schools!