Botswana

Joe & Sophie’s house

17 July 2013

While there are several “Southern African” restaurants in London, they lean heavily towards South Africa, and we were unable to find anything specifically Botswanan on the menu. So, back to the kitchen we go, for another home-cooked meal at Joe & Sophie’s.

While looking for ingredients for my pudding in New Cross’ Sainsbury’s, I get a slightly panicked phone call from Sophie. It seems that Joe has managed to source some genuine sorghum for his main course, which he considers something of a triumph, until it begins moving of its own accord.

Sorghum

This genuine sorghum comes with genuine weevils, in great quantities. The weevils are either “tiny, smaller than ants” or “massive beetles”, depending on whose eyewitness testimony you want to believe, but either way they are unwelcome, and the sorghum goes in the bin. Joe substitutes polenta for the sorghum, which is not exactly Botswanan, but it’s as close as we’re going to get and I dare say you can get it in Gaborone.

Weevil!

Sophie’s starter is vegetable potjie; a chunky soup with swede, celery, sweetcorn and other good things, stewed together for an hour. Simple but tasty.

Vegetable potjie

Then comes Joe’s main course which is really rather good. The substitute polenta works really well as a bland counterpoint to the strong flavours of the chicken and bacon dish, which is flavoured with chili, spices, red peppers and gherkins.

Chicken with bacon and mock bogobe

Finally, Steve’s Malva Pudding is also a success. This is South African in origin (Cape Dutch to be precise), but is apparently popular in Botswana as well. It seems like a fairly failsafe pudding to make, and when the vanilla custard soaks into it, it really is delicious.

Malva pudding

Drinks are ginger beer throughout, since that is a popular Botswanan drink. So is Rooibos tea, but we forget to make it, and anyway it is far too hot a summer’s night for that.

Scores

Food: 3.5 / 5

Recipes

Chicken with bacon and mock bogobe

210g sorghum
2 tbsp oil
160g bacon lardons
2 chicken thighs, skinned, boned and cubed
1 red pepper, chopped
3 large gherkins, sliced
70g sweetcorn
1/2 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp turmeric
1 tsp chilli paste
1 onion, chopped

Bring a pan of lightly-salted water to a boil. Add the sorghum grains. If your sorghum begins to crawl, shout ‘weevils!’, and throw it in the sink. Go to Plan B.

If not, cook the sorghum for about 30 minutes, until tender. Drain in a colander, rinse under cold, running water and set aside.

In a frying pan, heat the oil. Add the bacon and chicken and fry on a medium-high heat until the meat begins to brown. Stir in all the remaining ingredients and half a cup of water – about 125ml. Bring to a gentle simmer and cook for 10 minutes; the liquid should reduce and infuse with flavour. Stir in the sorghum and allow to heat through. Turn into a warmed dish and serve immediately.

Plan B
For a delicious replacement for your sorghum (and not unfaithful, since it is maize-based; the other Botswanian staple), make a soft polenta. This worked really well with the other ingredients:

400ml milk
Sprig of thyme
A few peppercorns
2 garlic cloves, bashed
150g quick-cook polenta
20g butter
1 tsp chopped rosemary
20g hard goat’s cheese or other well-flavoured hard cheese, grated

Put the milk and 200ml water into a saucepan. Add the rosemary, thyme, peppercorns and onion/garlic. Bring to just below the boil, then set aside to infuse for 20 minutes. Strain the infused liquid (or scoop out the flavourings with a slotted spoon). Bring to a simmer, then pour in the polenta in a thin stream, stirring as you do so. Stir until the mix is smooth and then it let it return to a simmer. Cook for just 1 minute, then remove from the heat. Stir in the butter and cheese, then season with salt and pepper, to taste. Serve immediately, with the chicken, bacon and vegetables on top (it won’t keep long).

Malva pudding

• 180g caster sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 1 tbsp apricot jam
• 150g plain flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 large tbsp butter
• 1 tsp vinegar
• 100ml milk

For the sauce:

• 200ml double cream
• 100g butter
• 100g caster sugar
• 100ml hot water
• 2 tsp vanilla extract

Heat oven to 170°C, grease 18cm square oven dish. Beat sugar and eggs, when mixed add jam and beat that in too. Melt the butter, and add it with vinegar to the bowl. Mix flour, baking powder and salt and beat this into the mix. Pour into the oven dish and bake 30 minutes.

Shortly before the pudding is done, melt the butter for the sauce, and mix in all other ingredients. Pour this over the pudding as soon as it comes out of the oven. Stick a knife in the pudding in a few spots, and leave for 10 minutes to soak in. It will sit on top for a while but eventually seeps down soaks in from the bottom.

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Cafe Resentin, 170 Goldhawk road, W12 8HJ

22 June 2013

I’m tempted to say there’s plenty to resent in this café, but that’s a bit unfair; a bit pun first, ask questions later. It is fiendishly difficult to find specifically Bosnian-Herzegovinian food in London. Despite the recent diaspora, and rumours of a Bosnian community around Bayswater, you’ll mostly find less specific Balkan restaurants in London, serving a melange of dishes from the peninsula. It seems the cataclysm of the 1990s hasn’t extended to ex-pat eateries. So, a relatively young country with fuzzy food boundaries presented a very particular problem. How could we be sure we were eating something Bosnian, rather than Balkan?

Failing a restaurant called Sarajevo Spice, what we needed was a Balkan place run by Bosnia-Herzegovinians. Explosive arguments online over the names of dishes presented a clue. The way forward, we decided, was in dish nomenclature. There was the pleasant-looking Mugi’s in Ealing, but a late intervention (“it’s Serbian! Look at their website!”) put paid to that. I had, however, found the little known Café Resentin on Goldhawk Road, which promised Sarajevski Ćevapi and Sirnica, giving a temptingly Bosnian air to its mixed-Balkan-and-beyond menu (Serbian White Bean Soup, Hungarian Goulash, etc). Surely a hint that our chef is thinking of home?

A bracing stroll from Shepherd’s Bush, Resentin is predominantly a coffee place that does some main meals. A large city-scape covers one wall (“Where is that?” “It must be Sarajevo”), little tables and little chairs are dotted around, a glass counter is full of snacks and sandwich fillings, and shelves in one corner display packets and tins from back home. We sit down with a coffee and await Steve, late as usual.

Sirnica

The menu is displayed on a board on the wall. In the event the wished-for Bosnian-Herzegovinian selection has been streamlined and diluted with more local fare, including the ubiquitous Full English. There is no sirnica listed, but I spot the last one in the shop nestling sulkily beneath the glass counter. It is a small coil of flaky pastry, filled with salty cottage cheese, like meat-free burek. it is a bit soggy but not unpleasant, and we share it between the three of us.

Pljeskavica – burger shaped meat

Cevapi – sausage shaped meat

For the main course we order the Sarajevski Ćevapi and the Pljeskavica. There’s nothing particularly interesting to drink, so we settle for cokes. The Ćevapi is a large collection of small, spiced, merguez-like sausages, served in a nice, airy somun flatbread, somewhere between naan and pitta. It comes with minimal adornment, save for a cleansing yoghurt dip and some thinly sliced red onion. It tastes pleasant enough, but is hamstrung by its sheer size and lack of variety in terms of texture and flavour, so that eating it becomes a chore somewhere around the halfway mark. The Pljeskavica, daringly, is almost exactly the same – the same fluffy flatbread, the same yoghurt and onion sides, and apparently the same meat, but now pounded into a large, flat burger shape. Perhaps they were hoping nobody would ever order both at the same time. All in all the food leaves us full but uninspired. Still, at least we’d managed to find truly Bosnian-Herzegovinian-Balkan food. Hadn’t we?

There’s just time for a quick chat with the friendly waitress before we leave:

“So, where’s that picture of?”
“Which one?”
“The big city photo covering the wall over there.”
“That? It’s Novi Sad. Serbia.”
“Ah… well… it’s lovely.”

~ J

Food: 2 / 5

Atmosphere 2.5 / 5