Making Egusi Soup - A Popular West-African Dish

One of my many hobbies is cooking and as much as I enjoy cooking, I haven’t cooked a lot lately due to my very busy schedule.
Today however I decided to make a meal instead of eating out. I made a dish called Egusi soup.

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Egusi soup is very popular across West Africa. It is prepared from ground egusi melon seed and is typically cooked with meat or fish and leafy vegetables. Because of its widespread popularity across the whole region, there are different recipes for making Egusi soup. Even in Nigeria, Egusi soup cuts across different regions of the country with different cultures and tribes having their unique recipe or a modification of the universal recipe.

Egusi soup is so diverse it can be eaten with different kinds of "swallow" foods or white boiled rice. Swallow foods are pliable yet firm doughy meals, similar to America's mashed potatoes but with more texture. Nigerian examples include pounded yam, eba, amala, starch, fufu, and many more. The pliable texture makes it easy to eat with your hand with a soup or stew.

Anyway, today I made Egusi and Eba.

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Ingredients

• Egusi (Ground melon seeds)

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• Meat.

I used offals for this. Offals entrails and internal organs of an animal used as food. Some well-known examples of offal include the brain, liver, kidneys, spleen, pancreas, stomach, thymus, tripe, tongue, and intestines. The parts I used are the tripes, kidney, liver and intestines. I prefer using offals to lean beef because they add a unique flavour to the soup.

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• Smoked Hake fish (known locally here as panla fish)

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• Dried shrimps

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• Smoked cowhide (known locally as kpomo or kanda)

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• Stockfish

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• Fluted pumpkin leaves (known locally as ugwu leaves)
• Salt
• Seasoning

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• Fresh scotch bonnet pepper

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• Cameroon pepper

Highly aromatic and spicy made from dried Scotch Bonnet Peppers It adds a distinctive taste to dishes. The “Cameroon” part of its name refers to the drying process.

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• Dried and ground scotch bonnet pepper

• Palm oil

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• Onions

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Steps

The first step to making egusi soup is cooking the meat and the other fish. I had to make a slight modification to mine as my roommate does not eat fish so I had to cook the meat and fish separately.

• I washed and cut the meat, kanda, stock fish and smoked fished and set them aside.
• The kanda has to be cut into tiny pieces as shown below.

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• I washed and chopped the fresh scotch bonnet pepper and ugwu leaves and set them aside.

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• I add the meat and kanda into a pot and cooked for about 15 minutes along with some part of the fresh pepper, dried peppers, salt, seasoning and onions and set aside.

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• I did the same for the smoked fish, stick fish and dried shrimps for about 10 minutes and set them aside.

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• Into an empty pot, I added the cooked meat and fish along with the broth.
• I added the chopped-up fresh pepper, palm oil and more seasoning to taste and allowed the whole mixture to cook for another five minutes.

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• I mixed up the ground egusi with a little water to make a thick paste which I then added to the boiling pot. I showed this to cook for another ten minutes.

• I then added the fresh chopped-up ugwu leaves and cooked for another five minutes.

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And that is it. The meal is ready to be served. Like I said earlier, my choice of swallow with egusi soup is pounded yam but as this was not available, I had to make do with Eba which is made with boiling water and garri (cassava flakes) and stirred until it forms a dough.

I absolutely enjoyed my meal today and I think I'll be cooking more often from now on.

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