SEC19 W3: "Stylish Living"

MY COOKING STYLE

Cooking comes to me naturally and over the years I have developed a unique style in cooking.

For you to call yourself a chef, your should have mastered some aspects like time management, ingredients manipulation and food presentation.
For the purpose of this writing I would try to explain this aspect briefly.

• Time management: I know you believe that the longer the time the sweeter the food... Isn't it?
  Wait till I tell you otherwise

The truth is, you can cook for lesser time if you know how to multitask and also knowing which ingredients you can pair, to give you the same result.

For example making "Banga"stew you can add everything at once and allow it to cook at the same time, rather than adding them separately wasting more time to achieve the same result.
Check this link to know how to make Banga stew

• Ingredients manipulation: to me natural spice is the magic and you can be the magician if you know how to use them. In Nigeria we have the luxury of dried cray fish and bonga fish aside this we have other spices.

• Dawadawa(dried Locust beans)

• Ginger

• Garlic

• Scent leaf

This above mentioned spices helps to elevate the taste of your meals.

Note: moderation is key or else you would ruin the whole meal.

• Food presentation: Before the mouth taste it, the eyes must accept it first. If you food is not presentation it would loose the ability to invite anybody to eat it.

Let's do a quick practical on how to make beans portage using some of this natural ingredient and method mentioned above.

First thing I did was to per boil my beans. Next I introduce my bean and other ingredients like onion, garlic, ginger, crayfish and generous amount of water and allow it to cook on high heat.

This is expected to cook for at least 30 minutes but if you enjoy your beans extremely soft just like me, you might want to cook longer than 30 minutes.

The reason why I cook my bean at the same time with the above mentioned ingredients is because I want them to release their flavors into the beans. When you add them separately they release their flavors into the stock and not the beans.

Some people make tasty stock but tasteless beans. If for any reason your separate the stock from the beans, the beans becomes tasteless.

If you noticed, I did not add salt, oil and pepper (of course you can not take away pepper from a Nigerian especially the ones from the western part 😂).

This is because the salt makes it a little bit harder to cook and we are on team save time.
Secondly the oil(palm) would steal the flavors making it hard for the beans to absorb the flavors.

When your beans is 95% cooked, you can now introduce you oil, salt and pepper, one at a time. With the oil going in first.
By that time the beans had already absorbed enough flavor. Allow to cook till you beans can literally melting your mouth without you chewing.

At this point your beans portage is ready. For the vegetable(scent leaf) you can add while it's still on heat, or you can add while serving.
If you are making a big portion of beans that would be reserved for later consumption, it better to add while serving, so you can preserve the freshness of the vegetables.

If you want to have a taste, you can drop you comments and observations at the comment section.. You never can tell Santa might be coming in July. 😂

Thank you for reading till this point. I would want to invite my friends to join in this contest. @alexanderpeace @ngozi996 @cristyshona click here for Link .

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