If I Bless the Rains Down in Africa...

...will someone in Africa send us some blessed rain to Austin?

It's dry as a bone here, and I'm sick of the little black ants that come out in droves when the earth is this parched. Yo, El Nino, what's the hold up with the moisture already?

Perhaps inspired by the heat and bone-dry conditions of home, I dug up a recipe I bookmarked several months ago and finally gave it a whirl.

African Chicken in Spicy Red Sauce*2 chicken breast halves, skinned (about 1/2 lb.)
2 chicken drumsticks, skinned (about 1/2 lb.)
2 chicken thighs, skinned (about 3/4 lb.)
3 T fresh lemon juice (1 lemon)
3/4 t salt, divided
1 1/2 C chopped onion (2 medium)
1 T minced garlic
2 t Berbere
1 T butter
1 T minced peeled fresh ginger
1/2 t ground nutmeg
1/2 t ground cardamom
1/2 C dry red wine
14 oz. fat-free, less-sodium chicken broth
6 oz. no-salt-added tomato paste
2 T chopped fresh cilantro
4 lemon wedges

1. Place the chicken in a shallow dish, drizzle with lemon juice, sprinkle with 1/2 teaspoon salt, cover and marinate in the refrigerator for 30 min.
   
2. Heat a Dutch oven over medium heat, and coat it with cooking spray.
   
3. Add the onion and garlic and cook 5 min. (do not brown), stirring frequently.
   
4. Add 2 teaspoons Berbere, the remaining quarter-teaspoon of salt, butter, ginger, nutmeg and cardamom, then cook 1 min.
   
5. Add the wine, broth and tomato paste, stirring until well blended.
   
6. Add the chicken mixture.
   
7. Bring the mixture to a boil, then cover, reduce the heat and allow it to simmer 50 min. or until the chicken is tender, turning it occasionally.
   
8. Stir in the cilantro.
   
9. Serve with lemon wedges.

Yield: 4 servings (serving size: 3 oz. of chicken, about 1 cup sauce, 1 lemon wedge and 1 teaspoon of Berbere)

*Now do you get the title of the post, Gentle Reader?

Nutritional Info
Calories: 373
Fat: 9.8 g
Sat fat: 3.6 g
Protein: 53.2 g
Carbs: 17.3 g
Fiber: 3.6 g
Cholesterol: 175 mg
Sodium: 848 mg

The Faudie's Futzings
After learning more about the cultural heritage and history of Indian food, I've wanted to try some Ethiopian cuisine. Even though Austin has two or three such restaurants, including one that's just up the road in Pflugerville, I've get to get my arse to one. So when this recipe, originally published in the October 2006 issue of Cooking Light, came in an email from MyRecipes.com, I knew I had to try it--eventually. How could I pass up a recipe described thusly: "This flavorful Ethiopian-inspired chicken stew uses Berbere, an Ethiopian spice blend."

And when the time came, I futzed. Oh boy, did I futz.

• For the chicken thighs and legs. I used three boneless chicken breasts I'd bought just a few hours before at HEB.
• The chicken wound up marinating for probably 50 minutes because I was not only making supper, but I was also preparing some of the chicken breasts I'd bought on the Foreman grill for the husband to use over the next few weeks on his and the boy's Tuesday night pizzas. (The bags of fully cooked, reduced-sodium, lightly seasoned breasts are just too expensive.)
  
• Butter? Do I friggin' look like Paula Deen?
  
• I had an opened can of tomato paste in the 'fridge with just a tablespoon missing (it had gone into the big pot of America's Test itchen Indian-Style Curry with Potatoes, Cauliflower, Peas and Chickpeas I'd made recently.) Was my spicy red sauce diminished by not having a full 6 ounces of tomato paste? Not in the least.
  
• Instead of peeling and mincing ginger myself, I got out my bottle of ginger paste and glopped about a tablespoon of the stuff into the Dutch oven (not Chive).
  
• Speaking of that Dutchie, I didn't spray it with cooking spray after it had warmed up. No, I poured a bit (maybe a teaspoon) of olive oil into the pan and heated it. I'm not a big fan of spraying stuff into a heated pan over the open flame of Lumpy. That's just...it seems needlessly dangerous. (Which begs the question: Is something ever needfully dangerous?)
  
• Having failed to thoroughly read the recipe before I started preparing it, I cut up the three chicken breasts into much smaller pieces--but did not cube them--to reduce the cooking time. I had hungry males to feed, and they sure as hell weren't going to wait 50 minutes for the pot to simmer and the chicken to cook, although I sincerely doubt chicken breasts need that much time to cook. I think I ended up simmering the stuff for just about 20 minutes, maybe a tad more because the boys weren't back yet from the plasma donation center at the time when I figured the chicken was probably ready to be eaten.
  
• Lemon wedges? Yeah, right.
  
• In deference to the boy's arch hatred of cilantro, I only stirred in about half a tablespoon of the stuff.

While the recipe recommends serving this concoction with basmati rice, I instead cooked up a big batch (more than 2 cups) of long-grain brown rice. I was jonesin' for some brown rice, and I thought this meal would be a great opportunity to polish off the bag I had so as to make space for bread-making ingredients in the pantry. The boy, being the cantankerous epicure he is, pitched a fit upon laying eyes on the brown rice. He was so enthralled in his tantrum about the brown rice that he never said a word about the presence of the cilantro. Go figure!

As for the flavor of the final product, the husband and I agreed that it tasted somewhat similar to a chicken curry I've prepared before--Garam Masala Murghi, perhaps--but with a tad more heat. The similarity of the flavor profile to that of a chicken curry is not surprising since so many of the same spices are used.

And what spices are used, you ask, Gentle Reader? Well, here's the recipe for Berbere, which Cooking Light kindly provided for those folks who can't find it at a local ethnic grocery (or at Whole Paycheck or Central Markup, and I was surprised to be unable to find it at either store).

Berbere2 T ground red pepper
1 T freshly ground black pepper
1 t ground ginger
1 t ground cinnamon
1/4 t ground cloves

You get a quarter-cup of the spice blend from this recipe. I had a small spice bag I'd saved from a previous bulk spice purchase, and I just dumped the ingredients into it, sealed it and shook it up to blend them all together.

Speaking of those ingredients, I took to heart the freshly in freshly ground black pepper. Part of the reason the chicken marinated so long was that I spent a good 15 minutes grinding black peppercorns in my pepper mill to get that tablespoon needed. Talk about a good late-afternoon workout!

If you don't know much about Ethiopian food, Gentle Reader, you might be interested to know that it's traditionally eaten, like curry in Indian, using morsels of bread in lieu of utensils. While I do have a package of naan in the 'fridge, I instead pulled out to big-ass pitas from a bag we'd bought from a local bakery. I popped them into Lumpy's warming drawer, but they weren't quite warm when it came time to finally sit down and eat. I don't think the pitas were a good pairing with this dish, so you might want to acquire some naan or even some traditional Ethiopian bread should you make the dish yourself, Gentle Reader.

And just for the hell of it, here's Toto with "Africa."