Do you like peanut soup?

For some reason, I've not had the strength to write a post about this particular dish which I feel should be known by a lot of Nigerians and probably by people in other countries.

I guess one of the reasons why I've been feeling lazy to write and publish this post maybe because I feel that there are many recipe posts on the internet, when you check google and search for the recipe of any type of food, you find it.

I don't want to bore us though. I remember when I was still on "uptrennd" when it was still in existence, I had the strength to write so many recipes for different food, majorly Nigerian food and not just with text alone but with pictures, not internet pictures but pictures taken with my phone and I always enjoy the moment.

Before I proceed, I will like to write down the quote that just came to my mind, I should title it as Jessica's quote. I have a lot of it saved on my notepad.

"If you have been doing something but you later find yourself losing interest in that thing which happens to be one of the things you are passionate about, instead of giving up on it, TRY A DIFFERENT APPROACH to doing it and you will be amazed at the outcome".

Groundnut soup is also known as peanut soup can be enjoyed with rice or starch like pounded yam, semovita, eba, etc.

From the name groundnut/ peanut, you would have been able to tell that the soup is made from groundnuts.

From my findings so far, I've noticed that some people prefer their groundnut soup with ingredients like tomatoes, ginger, etc

However, I don't use, the ingredients I use all the time when I want to prepare the soup are listed below.

• Groundnut

• Crayfish

• Red-oil

• Maggi & salt

• Onions

• pepper

• stockfish

• Black catfish

• cow skin (Kpomo)

• cow meat

• Sometimes scent leaf or bitter leaf.

I've heard some people say that they prepare the ground raw, however, I haven't tasted it when it is prepared raw but I have this feeling that it won't taste nice. I prepare the soup lime this.

After buying all the ingredients from the market, what I do first is to wash the groundnuts in a clean bowl of water, then drain it. After draining the water, I put some salt in and make sure it touches all the groundnuts in the bowl, I leave this under the sun so the water in the groundnut would get dried before roasting. However, sometimes, when I'm in a hurry, I skip the process of leaving it till it dries up, I just proceed to roasting, it doesn't affect the soup when it's ready.

The roasting method

I people prefer to just bake their ground in an oven while some roast it in a pot using either sand, salt, or garri (cassava flour).

Some people have said that the sand doesn't get into the groundnut when they roast with it, however, that's not my method, I can either use a small quantity of salt or a small quantity of garri, from my experience, it is preferable to let these contents that would be used in roasting the grounding in small quantity.

The first thing I do is to place a wide pot on the gas cooker, the heat should be from medium to low so that the groundnut won't get burned. Let the pot heat up for 3 minutes, then pour in the small quantity of salt at garri, let it heat up for 1minute. Pour in the groundnut after that and start stirring to avoid it getting burned.

Keep stirring so that the heat will heat every part of the groundnut.

Continue with the process till you see that when you remove one groundnut from the pot, the skin peels off easily and the groundnut itself is brown.

After the roasting process.

• Preferably, pour the groundnuts on a stainless tray and leave it to cool so that it would be easy to peel.

When it is cool, you can peel all the ground nuts fast by scooping some with your hands and rubbing them against each other so the peels come off then blow away the peels and put the peeled groundnuts In a clean bowl. Continue with this until all the groundnuts are peeled.

Once they are all peeled, add some water to the bowled and rinse the ground nuts. Then blend well till it's smooth with your blender, also blend the crayfish and onions with it.

The grinding method for

I take the bowl of peeled groundnuts, onions, and crayfish to a vendor who grinds food items like pepper, tomato, etc.

Before it is ground, I make sure to rinse everything well.

Cooking process

When I'm back home from grinding these three things (groundnuts, onions, crayfish), I wash the stockfish, meat, cows' skin, and blackfish thoroughly.

I start by looking at the stockfish, meat, and cow skin till it's soft before adding the blackfish and leaving everything to cook for another 3 minutes. Once that is done, I take out everything from the pot, place them on a clean plate, and leave the stock.

The next thing I do is reduce the heat and pour the smoothly ground groundnut into the stock, then I stir.

I leave this to cook well, sometimes for about 30 minutes and stirring occasionally so it doesn't get burned.

Once that time is up, I pour in the red oil, Cameron pepper, and let it boil out for another five minutes.

Sometimes, I don't put in more Maggi and salt because the stock usually has enough in it to make the soup was exactly how I want it to.

After the 5 minutes, I pour the meat and the fish back in, leaving that for another 2 minutes before putting in either scent leaf or bitter leaf which is optional.

After another 1 minute, the soup is ready.

The day I took pictures of the food while preparing it, I ate the soup with eba.

Eba is just a mixture of hot water and enough garri( cassava flour), forming a thick paste.

PS: Garri is called cassava flour in English.

Cassava flour mixed with hot water results in a thick cassava flour Master is the enough amount of cassava flour was poured into the hot water. We call that thick mixture eba.

Thanks for visiting my blog.