Afangoria

Sometimes it's not only fun to fail, but inevitable. Due to the proliferation of South end "ethnic markets" (please, a better name!), I've started making dishes I've never eaten before from ingredients I've never heard of. Such is the nature of the market crawl, where I pick up a bag of a strange powder, dried leaf, or arthropod and vow to cook with it. The results of such adventures vary wildly.

Perhaps I rely too strongly on the panacea of internet recipes. I assume that anything eaten by man will be clearly cited and classified on the web. There waits a citation-laden Wikipedia entry, or some botanical page with the Latin names and various cultivars. Not always so.

My latest adventure arose at the West African Market on Rainier Avenue, just North of Graham Street. The store is run by a convivial and helpful Guinean man. Along with the latest Nigerian soap operas, bootleg Afro-pop CD's, and various exotic beauty products, he's got an impressive array of dried, canned, and frozen goods straight from the motherland.

Exploring his wares is an exhaustive process. I've got the basic gist of playing around with palm oil, melon seeds, and smoked shrimp. I haven't messed with millet yet. Dusty bags of potash, hunks of cassava meal moulds, and whole dried Guinea fowl leave me clueless. But that doesn't always stop me.

Last week I picked up a quantity of knowns and unknowns. Among the latter was dried ukazi leaves, stuffed into a ziplock sandwich bag like shredded crepe paper. I found two different taxonomies for these leaves: Gnetum africana and Gongronema Latifolium. In other words, I'm not exactly sure what I'm eating. No different than processed foods, I suppose.

The next night, I scanned recipes for ukazi / afang soup, a Nigerian treat from the Niger Delta region. Most were vague, some were nearly unreadable. I read several recipes and looked for the common denominators. Usually this technique works pretty well, but it's harder when working with unknown ingredients.

Based on recommendations from several recipes, I jettisoned my own common sense and flew blindly. I have a few regrets in this regard:

1) the oxtails. I usually time them carefully in the pressure cooker and they turn out perfect. On this occasion, however, my negligence cost me. For about 30 minutes, they vacillated recklessly between a slow simmer and a violently rolling boil. When the soup was "done", the oxtails were not. Gnawing away at them reminded me of a dog with a pernicious rubber toy. It took hours to pick the strings of meaty tissue from between my teeth.

2) Salt. Starting with chicken bullion and incorporating various meats and fish, I really didn't need the extra dash or two of kosher salt. The lesson here: taste before you salt.

3) the ukazi itself: Since I had never had it before, I had no standard by which to compare it. It seemed to offer no flavor of its own, but had a curious texture, a chewy tear like eating seaweed. Had I cooked it long enough? Was this really ukazi, or bagged lawn clippings?

In the end, the soup was ok, but not good enough for me to post a recipe quite yet. If you're feeling adventurous, buy a bag of your own, hop on the internet, and get cooking. And don't forget the oxtails!