Cote d’Ivoire

Menu: kedjenou (chicken thighs cooked in a bed of veggies) | Recipe Source: http://www.travelfoodatlas.com

To be entirely transparent, prior to pulling this one from the jar, my Cote d’Ivoire knowledge began and swiftly ended with Didier Drogba. If asked to point to Cote d’Ivoire on a map, I’m confident that I would have gotten to West Africa, squinted around in confusion, and then taken a wild (and incorrect) guess. Mercifully, the recipe I chose deigned to include some good fast facts, though honestly as I’m typing them out, they were more about the recipe itself than the history of Cote d’Ivoire:

• Kedjenou originates from the Baoule and Bete ethnic groups
• The word “kedjenou” means shake or move, and traditionally, it was cooked in a clay pot over coals or open flame
• Cooking kedjenou was traditionally a village activity. The dish cooked for several hours since it took a while for the meat to become tender, so people would take turns shaking the pot while it was cooking to prevent the meat from sticking

Thoughts: This recipe is tied with gboma dessi (Togo) and chicken tagine (Morocco) as my favorite African meal from the experiment so far. It called for inexpensive, super healthy ingredients, and while the total cook time is three hours, it’s a hands-off, sit-around-waiting sort of three hours, not anything intense. And as is often the case with meals that are a flavor explosion, it tasted even better the next day.

Ready to Cook?

Kedjenou: https://travelfoodatlas.com/ivorian-kedjenou-recipe I made one ingredient addition and a few procedural tweaks to this recipe. After getting all the way to the end of the cooking instructions, I separated the chicken from the veggies, scooped out somewhere around half of the veggies, and then blended them up with my immersion blender. I added 1 tbsp creamy peanut butter (widely used in West African recipes!), pulsed again, and then stirred that puree back into the diced veggies. And then lastly, I heated up a little olive oil in a pan and quickly seared the cooked chicken thighs to give them some color.