CREATIVE SUNDAY- HOW I MAKE OHA SOUP.

▶️ Watch on 3Speak

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The native way to make Oha Soup.
African way to prepare soup and how I eat mine.

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▶️ 3Speak

Hello everyone, Welcome to my Creative Sunday. In this episode, I will be sharing with you how I make my Sunday worthwhile. I often don't cook on a Sunday, I rather prepare and cook everything on a Saturday but there were factors behind me not preparing it yesterday.

These are my ingredients;
i. Cocoyam.
ii. Palm oil.
iii. Red native pepper.
iv. Cubes of maggi and salt.
v. Stocks (beef, oporoko (codfish), and dried catfish).
vi. Utazi seed and leaf.
vii. Oha leaf.
viii. Crayfish and Ogiri (castor seed).
ix. Yellow pepper.

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Ingredients	Palm oil

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So this morning, I brought out the beef from the freezer, washed it, seasoned it, and boiled it for like thirty minutes or more. First of all, Beef is not my preference but the choice of my uncle I am living with, although there is a part of the beef I prefer. Using chicken or turkey is the best so far for me but at the same time, these stocks don't give me the native taste of the soup so either I go for the chicken/turkey or better still go for beef (the preferred part of the cow or goat meat).

With these stocks, I can get that desired native taste. If you come from the east you would understand what I am trying to say here. After boiling the seasoned meat, I took off one piece and diced out a segment to eat, meanwhile this is to ascertain if the meat needs extra heating or not. On the other hand, I have the oha leaves loosened on the tray and ready to be plucked. I don't know how you pluck yours but I always plucked the Petiole off; the petiole is the base of the leaf that has a stem-like appearance. Not the same method that was used in plucking the utazi leaves though.

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Cocoyam	Pounded Cocoyam

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As a norm, I always prepare my ingredients so that it would make my cooking easier and faster. For instance, pound the uziza seed first then add the crayfish and the pepper (yellow and red) to make a thick paste. Then I washed my oha leaves and uziza leaves, prepping the uziza leaves to be sliced while the oha leaves were shredded into pieces. According to my mom, it is important one uses his/her hands to shred the oha leaves because if a table knife is used to slice it then the leaves would be bitter therefore making the soup bitter.

Well, I have never attempted that on any oha soup and I don't know how true that is.
In this moment of preparation, I took out the cocoyam, washed it thoroughly, placed it in the pot, and cooked it for thirty minutes. After that, I peeled off the skin, threw it inside the mortar, and pounded until I achieved a fine smooth thick paste.

N.B: The cooking time depends on when the cocoyam softens and is ready to pound.

Using two gas-sitters always makes cooking faster.
I placed my medium-sized pot on the other sitter, poured in the meat, added more water, washed the dried/codfish (oporokpo), and added them too in the pot. I allow this to boil for about 15 min then add a little palm oil to give it a soup-like look. Normally my mom would boil palm kernel and rinse it off with water but to curb that stress, I use palm oil. In a few minutes, I added scoops of the pounded cocoyam inside the pot but in a different position, this would help quicken the thickening process.

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Ready to eat	Eaten from my portion/center>

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At this point, the pot needs to be covered to facilitate the boiling process, and it's a great time to add those sliced uziza leaves. The aroma of the soup should start seeping out now hehe after the addition of the sliced uziza leaves. Within 5 minutes the paste from crayfish, pepper, and uziza seed should be added also. I use the opportunity for it to simmer before adding other ingredients to clean up the kitchen. At some point, I would add the ogiri laterwards inside the pot and then wait for the real aroma of the ora soup but without the addition of the ora leaves you can't get the original aroma of oha soup.

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This is how my creative Sunday went..thanks to @hive-learners community for this initiative.

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