Poulet Yassa is a famous African food served during feast.
Preparing food for an African feast need not be costly or time consuming. You can easily find most ingredients in African recipes, although you might have trouble finding some of the more exotic items, such as banana leaves, in regular supermarkets.
An African meal does not typically include hors d'oeurves, appetizers, or soups before the main dish. Below are some examples of foods common in African feasts.
Poulet Yassa, or Chicken Yassa, is a traditional dish from Senegal. It is one of the most popular African recipes in the world. A crowd-pleaser because of its taste, texture, and overall combination of spices, the dish can be made with chicken or fish.
Either ingredient must be marinated overnight for maximum tenderness. Make the marinade from simple ingredients such as oil (any mild-flavored oil, such as peanut, palm or vegetable oil will do); lemon juice; onions, cider vinegar; garlic; Maggi sauce; cayenne pepper; a few bay leaves; and a bit of mustard. The dish calls for a lot of onions: for a crowd of 30 or more, use about 20 onions. Other ingredients include chopped chili peppers, cabbage, and carrots cut in chunks.
Once the chicken or fish is marinated, cook it over a grill, bake it in an oven, or sauté it for a few minutes on each side in a hot pan. Once the meat cooks, sauté the remaining marinade with the vegetables, reduce it to a sauce, and add the meat. Africans typically serve this dish with rice, couscous, or Fufu, a starchy side dish made from yams, plantains, or cassava.
Nyama Choma
Nyama Choma, or roasted meat, is a very popular recipe for large gatherings and feasts. This recipe for barbecued meat originated in East Africa. The dish's combination of meat and strong spices works well with any type of red meat, although it works best with beef short ribs. Ingredients include garlic, lemon juice, paprika, turmeric, coriander (cilantro), salt, black pepper, and the most essential ingredient of all, curry powder.
Mix all ingredients in a bowl to make a marinade for the meat for at least an hour, then grill the meat or broil it in an oven. This dish goes well with Irio (a mixture of mashed potatoes and corn) or Ugali (corn turned into a mush).
Couscous
Perhaps the most famous African food, couscous began as a staple in North and West Africa but quickly spread to Central Africa. Couscous is essentially a pasta made by mixing flour and water to form a paste and then drying it. The flour for couscous is often wheat, although some couscous is made from rice, corn, or black-eyed pea flour. In North Africa countries such as Morocco and Algeria, couscous refers not only to the pasta but also to the dish of stewed meats and vegetables served with it. You can buy ready-to-cook couscous from a specialty store and steam it in a special pot called a couscoussiere, or you can buy the boxed variety of instant couscous, which is boiled rather than steamed.
The couscoussiere for cooking real couscous has two parts: a cooking pot for the lower half, where the meat stew cooks, and an upper half, which has a second pot and snug-fitting lid. The upper half has holes at the bottom to let the steam escape. You can use a regular cooking pot with a metal colander on top instead of the couscoussiere.
Before cooking couscous, dampen it with oil or water; steam, remove, and cool it; mix it with butter or oil; and steam it again. Couscous goes well with any kind of traditional dish, especially stews such as Poulet or Poisson (Fish) Yassa.
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