Hello Diners! This month our armchair travels take us to Uganda in support of Clean Start Africa. Their mission is to work with women, girls, and children impacted by the criminal justice system, to restore dignity and hope for successful reintegration. While our grant this month is focused on Kenya, Clean Start Africa works in several countries, including Uganda, and we opted to offer you some variety for your menus, while also updating some recipes from the early days of the Proven Platter.

Ugandan cuisine is quite the melting pot, taking culinary influences from the Arabs, British, and especially India. The food is not typically spicy, but seasoned with tomatoes and onions to create flavorful, pleasing dishes. Their diet is based on a combination of a starch and a “sauce” at each meal. The starch may consist of Ugali (a type of cornmeal paste) or Matooke (mashed plantain) and is always topped with a sauce or stew made of groundnuts (peanuts), vegetables, or meat. Groundnuts are a vital staple and are most often turned into a sauce.

Other common foods include bananas, pineapple, beans, cassava, sweet potatoes, cabbage, and spinach. For this month’s recipes I’ve chosen to bring you recipes for Groundnut Sauce, or g-nut sauce as the locals call it, and a recipe for Ugandan Curried Cabbage. These recipes were already shared on our website years ago, but they needed current photos and updating. If you visit the Uganda recipe pages you’ll find many other dishes to choose from.

You can prepare a delicious vegetarian meal by adding a scoop of rice along with the G-nut sauce and Curried Cabbage to a bowl and be very satisfied. As shown in the photo though, I’ve opted to add a chicken thigh to the mix. I simply doubled the spices that were used in the g-nut sauce and rubbed some chicken thighs with the spices and olive oil before baking.

Enjoy your time in the kitchen preparing the groundnut sauce, it takes some attention and lots of stirring, but the aroma is worth it! Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or comments to lindamac.240@gmail.com.

Find more recipes from Uganda here and Kenya here.

Ugandan G-nut Sauce

Ingredients
1 cup of peanuts, (I used roasted and salted)
1 tablespoon chopped garlic
½ cup minced onion
1 cup diced tomato, small dice
1 teaspoon ground ginger
½ teaspoon cumin
½ teaspoon coriander
½ teaspoon paprika
½ teaspoon Kosher salt or ¼ teaspoon fine salt
Boiling water
Garnish – save out a bit of peanut powder and chopped tomatoes if you like

Directions
First, you’ll need to grind the peanuts. I used a food processor on high speed to do this job. You want to grind the peanuts as fine as possible without letting them turn into peanut paste. I was watching a video where the woman used a coffee grinder to turn out perfectly powdery peanuts, but that definitely did NOT work for me. So, stick with a food processor or perhaps a blender.

Choose a heavy bottom 3-4 quart saucepan so that the nuts won’t burn. Add the ground peanuts to a dry pan and stir and toast over medium low heat for about 5 minutes, until you can smell the aroma of peanuts. (I find a wooden spoon is the best utensil for stirring the pot.) Add the garlic and onions and stir for a few minutes to soften them. Next add the chopped tomatoes, stirring and mashing well for the next 5 minutes or so, until the tomatoes have broken down and the peanuts have come together into a kind of paste.

Now add the spices and let them bloom in the peanut paste for a minute, stirring continuously. Starting with 1 cup of the boiling water, stir it very carefully into the peanut paste and watch for spattering – maybe stand back a bit to avoid being splashed! Stir well over low heat. It should take about 5 minutes to thicken up. Stir occasionally while you are waiting. You will eventually see some of the oil rise to the bubbling surface. Once it starts thickening up, add another half cup of boiling water. Keep stirring! Once again, it will thicken up and you will see oil rise to the surface again.

Total cooking time for the sauce should be about 30 minutes. Don’t skimp on the time because you want the flavors to meld together, and you want the ground peanuts to soften properly. The more you cook the paste, the thicker it will become. Just keep adding bits of water until you have the desired sauce consistency. Taste and adjust salt to your taste. Peanuts are salty and they will vary. I started out with a modest ½ teaspoon Kosher salt, and found that I wanted to add a bit more.

The sauce can be made ahead of time, just note when reheating that you will need to thin it out with a bit of water. Serve over vegetables, any kind of protein, or mashed plantains. You could also turn it into a stew by continuing to add more vegetables, such as diced sweet potato, carrots, green bell peppers, or cabbage.

Recipe and photo credit: Linda McElroy

Ugandan Curried Cabbage

Ingredients
8 cups thinly sliced green cabbage (1½ pounds, or half of a very large head)
1 tablespoon chopped garlic
1 cup thinly sliced red onion
1 cup diced tomato
1 cup grated carrots
1 cup thinly sliced green bell pepper
1 tablespoon curry powder
1 ½ teaspoons Kosher salt, or ¾ teaspoon fine salt
Lemon wedges

Directions

Grab your widest sauté pan, mine is about 12 inches. Begin by warming a couple tablespoons of oil in the pan. Add the garlic and onion and sauté for a few minutes. Next add the diced tomato and simmer with the onions until it looks saucy and broken down. Add the grated carrots and stir for a few minutes, then add the sliced bell peppers and give that just one more minute.

Add the curry powder and salt to the mixture and stir well. Add the cabbage to the pan, pour in a splash of water, cover the pan, and let it steam for one minute. Remove the lid, you’ll see that the cabbage has started to wilt a bit. Stir to mix everything together. Keep tossing and stirring until the cabbage is just how you like it.

Now, how thinly you sliced your vegetables and how you crisp you like them will determine how much longer to cook. I found that the whole process from start to finish took about 10 minutes for me to achieve just-crisp vegetables. My cabbage was sliced quite thin so it only took a few minutes.

Serve with a scoop of rice and g-nut sauce for a delicious vegetarian/vegan meal. Make sure to include some lemon wedges to squeeze over everything to brighten the taste.

Recipe and photo credit: Linda McElroy