Africa-Inspired Food Choices For A New You. With the new year well and truly underway, many of us are fully into our body transformation plans. We want to improve the way we look AND eat more sustainably at the same time. Fortunately, those two things go hand in hand.
Want to know how to remove fat without surgery? Easy: either go for non-invasive surgery or just eat right. Here are some fat-melting recipes that are good for your health and also the planet.
Ethiopian Peanut Stew
Ethiopia probably has the most exciting food heritage of any country in Africa – even more so than Moroccan, thanks to the role Addis Abbaba played in trade centuries ago. The land we see today was once an essential stop-off for merchants as they carried spices from the Near and Far East.
The country is famous for its teff bread, but it also makes a mean stew too.
Ingredients for up to six people:
- One onion, chopped
- Three cloves of garlic, chopped or crushed
- Tbsp olive oil
- Two 450g tins of chopped tomatoes
- Three tablespoons of peanut butter
- 6 cups of stock
- Diced sweet potato
- Chickpeas
- Fresh parsley
- Whole, roasted peanuts
- Greens of your choice
- Chopped red pepper
- Salt and pepper
Method
Making this receipt is easy.
First, fry the onions and garlic in the olive oil in a large pan on a gentle heat until they turn translucent.
Next, add the tinned tomatoes, stock, sweet potatoes, chopped red pepper, stock, chickpeas, and peanut butter.
Leave to simmer for 20 minutes or until the sweet potatoes are cooked through.
Next, add the greens and the parsley until wilted.
Meanwhile, put the peanuts on a tray and roast them in the oven for a couple of minutes.
To assemble, use a ladle to spoon the soup into bowls and then sprinkle the roasted peanuts and whole parsley on top.
If you’ve never tried this recipe before, you’re in for a treat. It is unlike pretty much anything else out there. If you want to bulk it up a bit, serve it with crusty wholemeal bread or teff pancakes if you can find them!
When food tastes this good, making healthy choices is easy. Often, all it takes is a little experimentation to discover all of the flavors out there. You don’t have to stick with regular diet foods. They’re manufactured products cooked up in Western labs. It’s much better to delve into the food cultures of other civilizations to see what they ate and how they kept the pounds from accumulating in the past.
What you’ll find, almost invariably, is that they centered their diet around traditional staple foods. In Ethiopia, they got their calories from teff and another grain called sorghum. To that, they added a range of fresh local vegetables and beans.
The Native Americans ate a diet of quinoa and corn, as they believed that these foods gave them the energy and vigor they needed to survive a harsh, nomadic existence.
And in the far east, the Japanese ate mostly brown rice and sweet potatoes, again with a bit of veg thrown in for good measure. These foods kept people slim and healthy, and they can do the same for you.
