Hardest Naija Meals to make

Cooking is like bringing love and beauty to the world. The chef has ingredients playing their individual instruments in a gastronomic orchestra which has to be blended seamlessly into a homogenous entity. The audience come for love and beauty. Once that curtain is drawn and the burners come on, the clock starts ticking and the already great expectations go through the roof.

It is a big responsibility to satisfy the hungry with love and beauty served on a plate. Each comes with an appetite and some sense of entitlement. They might have paid some money or perhaps feel that family ties qualify them to be fed on demand.

Just like the great orchestra conductor’s work does not start at show time, the same applies to the chef. There are manuscripts to pore over, ancient recipes for success that have to be practiced over and over again. Instruments have to be in tune and played with fervour. The chef plans the meal, keeps a mental note of what elements are needed and goes to great trouble to assemble a great cast. Once the burners come on, it is a race against the clock. The meat would not be fresh forever and once in the hot water it has a narrow window of opportunity to transform from raw talent to finished article while at the same time being in rhythm with every other pot occupant that gets added at different stages of the performance. Movements of the hand come at strategic times in the process and the chef conducts alone.

 The Urhobos have a soup called Esha (Isha) cooked with a special Esha beans that needs six hours of cooking as a preliminary before the soup is cooked the next day. The most popular Urhobo soup is Owoevwri (Owo soup) which can be ready in ninety minutes. If Owo is a 100 meters sprint then Esha is an arduous marathon.

This no doubt is the hardest soup (Esha) to make in Urhobo land (Located in the Niger Delta) and was only eaten in my childhood at the Christmas and New Year seasons when there was time to prepare the ingredients and boil that beans that took forever to get cooked.

The preparation of Apku from the cassava stage is another lengthy process. There are some meal preparations that can best be described as aerobic workouts or hard labour. Long before the arrival of instant Pounded Yam powders (that contain rice, potatoes and starch with about only 60-70% yam) people actually pounded boiled yam in a mortar with a pestle. As a young lad it was not unusually to hear Lagos neighbours pounding away across the street. In a tropical country sweat flies everywhere at the hint of exertion and this was why we always heard the wives talk about all the sweat I have put into this marriage during all marital disputes.

The Naija kitchen can be a very hot and lonely place. It is predominantly inhabited by the ladies (or female domestic home helps). Some things make the meals very hard to conjure up and in retrospect it has nothing to do with the technicalities of the food making process. Below are a list of the hardest Naija meals to make.

Cooking meals with limited money

Once the next meal’s arrival is unsure, the meal at hand becomes hard to make. Positive people may say ‘eat today and sleep but let tomorrow take care of tomorrow’. One really needs a strong mind bursting with faith to cook the last food in the house, singing happily and knowing fully well that hunger like mosquitoes always come back. Mums may not announce to the family that she is serving the last supper to spare the kids of the burden of worry. Some kids might complain about what’s for supper during the cooking process. That is when sweat and tears mix on a sad face.

I don’t know where the next meal is coming from

Cooking for funerals

At a time when the bereaved should be comforted, they are busy cooking for the whole village in the name of doing a befitting burial. Men in black turn up looking a bit sad then give the bereaved a hug worth N1000 and proceed to drink beer and wine worth N3,000 and eat food worth N6,000. Why should someone who has just had the worst news of their lives be at the market buying dry fish and yams by the truck load? The ironic thing is if the food is very good, greedy relatives would start to ask if there was a Will and if their name was mentioned in it.

Cooking under these circumstances is tiring. People would gladly cook four times the amount of food and go days without sleep for a joyful occasion such as a wedding but Naija culture wants a carnival because someone had a stroke and died.

Cooking for a neurotic man

Some Naija men don’t eat soups that have been in the fridge. It has to be straight from the pot to the plate. This kind of men are not usually the indomie type. It has to be pounded yam and their favourite soup. You wonder what these men think refrigeration was invented for.  Talk about a hard knock life!

These crazy men also never cook.  It is almost as absurd as a guy saying he never watches highlights to his team’s Premiership matches on the television as his taste is live games. Then he asks someone else to buy his season ticket for home games and pay his transport costs and stadium entry fees for all away matches.

My village people will tell him that before you grow the teeth of a rabbit be prepared to grow the lip to cover it. New soup ko, new flame ni.

Cooking when pregnant

To bend down and open the oven can be problematic when you are carrying a large oven on your abdomen.

Cooking while lonely and depressed

The monotony of doing repetitive tasks that have been done so many times before such as peeling potatoes or slicing tomatoes means that one slips into automatic actions needing no thoughts as all actions are done instinctively. That is when the mind really travels. Regrets, sadness, guilt, people who are missed all come flooding into the mind. Tears flow while standing alone in a hot kitchen. No one but the chef knows how hard it was to get those plates of food infused with love and beauty to the table.