With the festive Congo music in the background last night and some good ole' Maker's, I started preparing my three Congolese dishes. It turned out to be more time consuming than difficult.

1. Mwamba (chicken stew): I got the recipe from (http://www.recipezaar.com/Mwamba-170705) whose screen name was Sackville. The recipe was a bit vague, but embodied all the other recipes I was looking at for Mwamba quite accurately.

Ingredients
1 chicken, cut up, or 1 kg beef or lamb, or 750 g fish fillets, fresh or thawed
Salt to taste
Oil
2 large onions, cut up
2 to 4 chili peppers, mashed, or diced
1/2 to 1 tbsp. dried crushed red pepper
6 or 7 tomatoes, peeled, seeded and mashed

Preparation
Season chicken, meat or fish with salt. In a heavy stewing pan, sauté chicken, meat or fish in the oil with onions until well browned. Add chili peppers, tomatoes and just enough water to cover. Simmer until tender and thoroughly cooked. Chicken mwamba is usually served with boiled rice. Fish, lamb or beef mwamba is usually accompanied by fried plantain.

I will suggest that you saute the chicken on a separate pan first to brown (especially if you are using drumsticks like me) because the onion browns way too fast and also you kind of get a great color on the chicken. I also used 1 1/2 Serrano chilies peppers which are really really spicy so beware. The cook time was about two hours. Remember to boil the chicken then simmer it. Don't boil it for two hours or you might end of having meatless bones. It was a simple dish, but the aroma in my kitchen that night gave it a comfy homey feeling like one of those "mom" dishes on a cold winter night. The dish's simple flavors from the tomatoes and onions infused into the succulent meat with the slight tinge of heat from the chilies was purely delicious. I will without doubt continue to make this dish.

2. FuFu: This recipe was found in the Celtnet recipes (http://www.celtnet.org.uk/recipes/miscellaneous/fetch-recipe.php?rid=misc-fufu).

Ingredients
400g fermented cassava flour (or cassava flour)
600ml water

Preparation:
Method: In a large stock pot add the cassava flour and mix the water with this to form a smooth paste. Heat gently, stirring continually (stir from the edges of the pot towards the centre) until the paste thickens and you can begin to form it into a ball. The consistency and colour changes from a white liquid to a yellow glutinous paste. Before the fufu is ready the entire mixture should be yellow. If you have a ball and some bits are still white, add a little more water and continue to cook until it's all done. The final consistency should be that of a well-kneaded bread dough.

Follow the prep for this above and it was very easy to make. Here I'll even calculate it in cups for you to make it even easier: 400 grams is about 1.75 cups and 600 ml is about 2.5 cups. Just remember not to put the pan on high heat or it probably would burn and stick to your pan. Fufu has this sticky doughy consistency that tasted just like flour and water. I did what they did in the Congo where they made a small ball out of it and then indent it with a finger to scoop food with it and it worked well. Like Andrew Zimmerman when he went to Africa and tasted this, it was definitely an aquired taste. Greg enjoyed it with the Mwamba, but honestly, I was only able to have it twice and I was done with it.

3. Saka Saka: Thanks to the guidance of A. Soleil Banguid in the Bay Area, I don't think I would have ever been able to make this dish. Please refer to (http://www.ivu.org/recipes/african/saka.html) for more information.

Ingredients:
3 packages of frozen cassava leave
1 package of frozen spinach (or fresh)
2 green sweet pepper(cleaned and finely chopped)
half habanero pepper ,chopped
1 small package of green onions
1 big red onion roughly chopped
1 big red onion cut in round 6 big cloves of garlic ,mashed
salt,black pepper to taste
1 and half of palm oil half cup of peanut butter
1 liter of water

Preparations:
Put all the ingredients together in the pan except: peanut butter, palm oil, onion cut in round. The water shoud cover the veggie. Let it boil till the cassava leaves are tender when you taste, if not soft add more water. The secret is to have them soft before the final step (oil and peanut butter). Once the veggies are soft, you should have at least 1 cup of water left, if not add so and set the pan aside. In a small container melt the peanut butter with some oil and pour over the veggies, mix them all together. Then add some saute onions and then pour onto the the veggies and return the pan to the fire. Mix everything together and let it simmer for 15 min and ajust the spices. Serve with cassava or foufou or rice, bread or boilled yuca.

Looking at the chopped cassava leaves, it resembled spinach at first, so when Soleil says "be patient" and it will take 2-4 hours to cook, I was worried this dish was going to be way over cooked and mooshy. To my surprise, cassava leaves are dense fiberous-like greens that definitely required a lot of time to cook down. It was about two hours before Stacey, our guest, was to arrive that I began cooking this dish. I really should've given myself way more time. Like two hours more. So, in order for me to cook this dish faster, I basically boiled it with the lid off for two hours and cooked it down. Remember if you are to do this to watch over this pot as the water boils down really quick and the dish can get very dry. Just add water if needed. Saka Saka by itself has a grassy kale-like flavor with the end consistency of collard greens. With the peanut butter, it really softened that grassy taste and it also gave it more of a creamy texture. (Or it would've just been like we were eating cooked grass or leaves from a tree) Greg loved it and had seconds, Stacey thought it was good, and I will give it another chance.

Here is what it looked like after we plated it:

The basic idea of Congolese comfort food was no different than what you and I eat-- a basic meat dish, a vegetable dish and a carbohydrate. They used the accessible ingredients around them combined with the importation of spices from being colonized to create these great simple dishes. I was thoroughly surprised today. I'm even going to continue making the Mwamba but maybe adding my own twist to it. Woohoo! I conquered my first official country and many more to go. As our guest, I had the lovely Stacey choose the fate of my next trip: