Mali

Menu: Tigadegue-Na (Maafe) | Recipe Source: myprettybrowneats.com

Confession: Over the last two or so years, I’ve routinely stumbled across African recipes that heavily rely on a mysterious legume called the groundnut. Despite our paths repeatedly crossing, I’ve always ended up choosing a different recipe to tackle and therefore never was forced to do any research* on this staple ingredient. Then came Mali. Imagine my surprise when I stumbled across a recipe for tigadegue-na (also called maafe or mafé in Senegal and domoda in The Gambia) that described the dish as “a traditional and iconic groundnut (peanut) stew eaten ubiquitously across West Africa.” And thus, it dawned on me that the elusive, exotic groundnut had actually been sitting in my pantry in a bag labeled “roasted, unsalted” this whole entire time.

Tigadegue-na is easily one of the best soups to come out of this project and it’s a dish that I’ll be returning to over and over again. Made of tomato, peanut, sweet potato, habanero**, ginger, garlic, and sirloin, it’s a celebration of the warm, nourishing flavors of autumn and the perfect hearty meal for a rainy day. It’s a cinch to whip up (especially if you buy pre-cut stew meat), high in proteins and nutrients thanks to the beef and the small army of vegetables required, and it made the house smell divine.

*Research, a word which here means “typing what-is-a-groundnut” into Google

**If anybody knows where to find fresh scotch bonnet peppers, please let a girl know

Ready to cook?

Tigadegue-Na (link): I used sirloin stew meat instead of oxtail because I couldn’t find the latter at King Soopers and didn’t want to make two trips. I doubled the amounts of ginger and garlic in the tomato base (as is tradition) and added tomato paste (1.5 tbsp) and chicken bouillon (1 tbsp) directly to the blender cup. My blender is a weakling and needed more liquid to process the mixture, so I also added 1/3 cup beef broth to get things moving. I roughly chopped the other half of the red pepper, 2 remaining Roma tomatoes, 2 more habaneros (seeds removed), and 1/3 cup of parsley and added that to the cooking onions because thought more texture would be fun, and when it came time to add the peanut butter (I bought chunky instead of smooth on accident), I only added 1/3 of cup instead of half because I didn’t want it to overpower things. I used probably 3 cups of beef broth in the end instead of 2 (simply because I wanted a thinner soup- mine was turning out somewhat pasty with only 2 cups) and to make up for the reduced peanut butter, I processed 1/3 cup of whole roasted peanuts in my coffee grinder, pulsed them until they were basically flour consistency, and then added that to the mix, too.