African Culture

Samosas made egg roll style

Ingredients:

4lbs potato
8-12 small shallots
hot chili peppers
garlic
peas
turmeric
shredded ginger
ground ginger
chili powder
paprika
cumin
spring roll wrappers

All the ingredients for this dish can be easy located at any of your friendly neighborhood Asian markets.  I went to Thai Phat on North St. to get mine and just had a wonderful experience.

First your going to want to boil the potatoes until you can stab them with a fork pretty easily.  When they are ready, let them cool and in the meantime fry up the shallots, onion, garlic, peppers and peas for a little to soften them up. Next roughly mix in bowl the potatoes, fried veggies and all other ingredients. It should turn an interesting yellow color. Next wrap up in spring roll wrappers however you please. I found the egg roll strategy was the easiest, rolling them up like mini burritos.
 

Yam + Muffin = Yamuffin

The Aftermath

Sor Patel

Liver in the shape of Africa!

A collaborative effort from both Dan and Dylan was necessary considering the great lengths that they went to in order to create this magnificent dish.  First, we had to get pig kidney and pig liver.  This does not entail just some stroll down to the local grocery store meat deli.  We're talkin' a half hour drive down to Ferrisburg to get the offal from Vermont Livestock Slaughter & Processing.  Dan and I drove there and picked up about three times more offal than we even needed and it was five bucks, which was clearly an arbitrary price because they never sell this stuff (see picture below).  Everyone at the the slaughterhouse thought we were freaks.  We then went from there to the Brixton Halal Market on North Street where we got cubed camel to replace the traditional pork.  Pretty weird, but this is potluck culture, and how often do you get an excuse to cook camel?  It's pretty much like a fattier, gamier version of beef--be sure to stew it for a while to tenderize it.  Essentially, all you need to do is throw all these ingredients in a pot and stew it for 24 hours:

...unless you get it directly from the slaughterhouse.

3 pounds of cubed camel
1 pound of cubed liver
11 oz of cubed kidney
A bunch of the following:
      tumeric
      paprika
      black pepper
      hot pepper
      garlic
      ginger
      apple cider vinegar
      salt
      cloves (5 or so)

Before adding the spices, you can make an amazing paste by crushing the spice on a cutting board with a rolling pin and putting it in a bowl with the vinegar.  This paste looks and smells amazing--I dream about it.  Basically all you have to do to cook this is to simmer it until the offal breaks apart.  The recipe I got this from said that it disintegrates into the sauce in about an hour.  That is bullshit.  We simmered it for about 20 hours and there were still good chunks in the stew.  We ended up boiling the hell out of it and crushing the obvious chunks against the side of the pot with a spoon.  It comes out tasting like a super-flavorful African-spiced chili, and we chose to serve it with rice.