Bukie’s Kitchen Muse: Taking Nigerian Cooking to a Creatively New Level.
I love cooking shows! But I have never had much appetite (no pun intended) for the ones where they put the chefs in competition with each other and give them a certain time to prepare their culinary delights. I prefer those shows where the chef talks you through the food preparation process. For a long time, I was hooked on Nigella Lawson – something about the seductive way she talks to the food, makes you want to go out and get the ingredients and make whatever she has prepared. Nigella has been off the scene for a while now and with the advent of YouTube and the channels that accompany it, there have been a number of cooking shows that have surfaced. I have been particularly drawn to the ones from my native Nigeria. It was on YouTube, I learned how to bake moin moin in the oven. So you can imagine my delight when I recently discovered Bukie’s Kitchen Muse. I love the creative spin Bukie puts on Nigerian dishes. Recently, there was a tomato scarcity in the country – a crisis in a country where tomatoes serve as a staple for the mouth-watering stews, soups that are part of the country’s culinary fare. Bukie offered an ingenious alternative to tomatoes – carrots. Who knew! And this is what makes her cooking show stand out – making jollof rice from bulgur wheat or fried rice without rice (she used cauliflower). My all-time favorite is the oatmeal fufu, in which you use the regular oatmeal and make it into a fufu.
The culinary enthusiast in me who strives to eat healthy has tried the oatmeal fufu with delightful results
I used the milling blade of the Nutribullet to blast the oatmeal!
The powdery result was cooked in hot water the way fufu is made
Et voilà
Et Voiçi. Oatmeal fufu, efo riro and baked lamb. Yum Yum, then some.
And whi
le we are on the topic of Naija food, coming out this week is a book I have been looking forward to reading, Yemisi Aribisala’s Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex and Nigerian Taste Buds. My copy is on pre-order, so please watch this space for a review of that and as Bukie says at the end of her videos: Bon Appetit!
