Steaks at Rare Cuts. Photo by Renee Bienvenu.

Food historians believe that the first iterations of civilization began thousands of years ago when meat met flame. As the story goes, mankind was drawn in from the wild, where he cooked and shared a meal with his fellow hunter-gatherers. This theory of the dawn of civilization rings true today. Barbecues, cochon de laits, and backyard grill outs are still some of our favorite parties to attend. But even though the simple equation of Meat + Fire = Dinner has not changed since our Paleolithic ancestors roamed the Earth, no venue is more popular for celebrating a momentous occasion than the all-American steakhouse.

A massive hunk of crusty, rosy-red beef, some form of potato, and a bottle of red wine served in a white table cloth and leather-bound setting is a formula for guaranteed satisfaction—until the waiter drops the check off at your table. Rare Cuts gives the home cook access to top flight meats in order to create a steakhouse experience in your own dining room at half the price. And what better time to indulge in the pleasures of animal protein than in the waning days of the Carnival season, after which we are required to stay away from meat for 40 days or else winter will continue for an extra six weeks. Or something like that.

Inside the small storefront at the corner of Nashville and Magazine, Rare Cuts has created a tiny carnivore’s paradise. The refrigerated display shelves are stocked full of every cut of beef, pork, lamb, and veal that one could imagine. In addition to the wide selections of cuts, Rare Cuts offers both wet and dry-aged meat, the latter of which is rarely available for consumer purchase. While the price of dry-aged beef may cause sticker shock to some, the intensity and depth of flavor is worth the price of gold (or in this case, the price of a bone-in, cowboy cut ribeye).

Filets, strip steaks and other common cuts are available, but the best choice is a cut which you may have never heard of: spinalis. Better known as the cap of the rib eye, these are best coated in kosher salt and coarse ground black pepper and then pan roasted. Have cast iron? Good. Use it for the spinalis, along with a healthy knob of butter. The results are sublime. And if you need to crank it up to 11, we have two words for you: lamb spinalis.

If fowl is more your style, Rare Cuts offers premium selections of duck, chicken and quail. Craving a slice of seared foie gras to gild the lily? No problem. You can even pick up twice-baked potatoes and creamed spinach to round out the meal. And for those who desire the classic steakhouse experience with none of the work, Rare Cuts has a private dining room available that can host up to 19 of your closest friends. Bring the wine, choose your own steak straight from the cooler, and toast to the end of another Carnival season.

801 Nashville Ave. (504) 267-4687. Monday – Saturday 10 a.m. – 7 p.m.; Sunday 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Chris Edmunds of the New Orleans Moonshiners Hits the Spot at Baru. Photo by Caitlyn Ridenour.

Baru Bistro & Tapas
3700 Magazine Street
(504) 895-2225

How often do you come here?

I come here once every couple of months with my girlfriend. It’s one of her favorite restaurants; she eats here a lot.

What do you usually order?

The deep-fried Louisiana oysters and the fried fish. They fry the whole thing; it comes with the head and tail and everything on it and it’s delicious. It comes with coconut rice, which is made with coconut milk and patacones, which are like mashed plantains.

So this is a Caribbean restaurant?

Yeah, the owner is from Colombia, and they also do tapas. It’s kind of like Spanish with an emphasis on Colombia. I lived in Colombia for a while, so that’s a reason I love it so much.

The Gravy: In the Kitchen with Raphael Bas.

“In France, you go to the bakery. The king cake is right there, under your nose. It’s cooked, ready to go, some of them still warm. Looks beautiful. It’s easy to just grab it from there and consume it. Eat it! Bakeries are there for that. Patisseries.

But you see, February, it’s the month of crêpes in France. The sixth of February is the great crêpe day. It’s huge. It’s a national thing. Everyone makes crêpes. King cake, in France, is more of a January thing. We celebrate the kings in January, for the Epiphany, after New Year, and then it’s over. But here, the king cake is related to Mardi Gras, from the Epiphany to Mardi Gras, and in France I think we lost the tradition of this—at the end of January, that’s it, it’s done. After that we don’t have king cake. But in Nice, in the south of France, we celebrate Mardi Gras, with parades and floats and everything. It’s very traditional and they have their own king cake and it looks more like the New Orleans king cake, like a ring, but instead of all the sugar, they put fruit on it. That’s their king cake.

Historically somewhere, something got shifted. New Orleans kept traditions that we lost in France, and meanings changed. That’s true for food, and other things too, like Joan of Arc. People use symbols to further their own cause. Like Petin, during the German invasion, used Joan of Arc in order to get the people to accept the invasion. But De Gaulle, with the liberation, he took her, her image and icon, and used it. Today, Joan of Arc is mainly used by the right-wing. The fleur-de-lis is another one. In New Orleans, it’s a symbol you see everywhere and there is no shame; in France, people are very uncomfortable when they see a fleur-de-lis. If you tattoo a fleur-de-lis on your arm in France, for the general public, it will have a meaning like royalty, sovereignty, blue blood; like you belong to the bourgeoisie, to the upper crust. Here, it’s just a symbol of New Orleans and Louisiana.

When we eat king cake in France, we put a small porcelain figure, a favor, in it too. Everyone sits at the table, the whole family, and the youngest has to go under the table while the adults cut the cake. Whoever finds the favor becomes king or queen and has to choose a king or queen from around the table. That’s why there are always two paper crowns on the king cakes in France. The favor in the king cake used to be a fava bean, like they use for St. Joseph’s day here, but they can be all kinds of shapes now, often biblical, like the Virgin Mary, or a lamb, or a character from The Simpsons. Sometimes they’re really nice; people collect them. They can be $50 or $60 each. Hand-made, hand-painted.

I bake tarts. My grandmother taught me. Tarts, and clafoutis with cherries, because we used to have a cherry tree. And crêpes, I love crêpes. And salade de carottes, grated carrots. I love that.

The mistake we made with this king cake is we forgot the chimneys, the holes. So the almond cream burst out the sides. It could rise up to a point and then it burst. Also, it’s a little thin. This recipe is not exactly what it’s supposed to taste like, but it’s close.

This is off the record, but I never liked the New Orleans king cake. It’s too sweet for me.”

French King Cake (Galette des Rois)

1/2 cup sugar
3/4 cup almond meal (Whole Foods)
1 tablespoon corn starch
1 pinch sea salt
9 tablespoons unsalted butter, soft
1 drop almond extract
1 tablespoon Cointreau
2 large eggs
1 lb all-butter puff pastry, thawed
1 egg yolk
1 tablespoon water
1 porcelain trinket or dried bean
1 tablespoon confectioner’s sugar
1 tablespoon hot water

Prepare the almond cream filling: In a bowl, combine sugar, almond meal, corn starch and salt. Stir until smooth. Mix with butter. Add extract and Cointreau, then eggs, one at a time, mixing well. Cover and chill for at least 1 hour.

Roll out puff pastry and cut two 12-inch rounds. Place one round on parchment paper and cover with almond cream, staying 1 inch from the edge all around. Combine egg yolk with water in a cup and brush the outer rim of the dough, avoiding the actual edge (this will prevent the dough from rising). Bury the trinket in the almond cream. Place the second round of dough on top, pressing down all around the sides to seal. Make a decorative pattern by scoring (but not piercing) the galette. Brush the top with egg wash.

Pierce 5 holes in the top, one in the center and four around the sides. Refrigerate (or freeze) for at least 1 hour. Bake on top of a cookie sheet at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. In the final minutes of baking, brush with a mixture of confectioner’s sugar and hot water for a shiny finish.

Andrew Zimmern of Bizarre Foods America shucks Louisiana oysters at a backyard crawfish boil in Bayou Pigeon. Photo courtesy of the Travel Channel.

Andrew Zimmern has yet to encounter a culinary specialty in Louisiana that he didn’t fall in love with. The region is known for its unusual fare compared to many other foodie destinations, but there isn’t much that shocks Zimmern’s taste buds. “I didn’t realize I would wind up making a show that was basically snuff film for picky eaters,” he says of his Travel Channel program, Bizarre Foods. The show features Zimmern traveling the world and trying local foods that the average American eater would never dream of ingesting. The new season, which debuts with its 100th episode on January 23, will come home and rediscover the bizarre foods of the U.S.

Zimmern visits Louisiana and New Orleans in an episode that airs January 30, 2012. “There’s no other place in the United States of America where if you say the name, you can taste the food, he says. “Los Angeles is a great city, but when I say that, you don’t taste it.” Although the food industry everywhere else tends to pull together, Zimmern sees a sense of camaraderie in New Orleans that he feels is unmatched and lends something to the spirit of the food community itself. “The spirit of the city hasn’t been bulldozed underneath a lot of other bullshit,” he says.

In Zimmern’s visits to the state, he’s found what many others have seen, that many food traditions remain unspoiled and are maintained in daily life. The local food culture of the region has never been pushed too far below the surface, which in this age of processing and factory farms is a testament to the active participation of food providers and consumers in the preservation of local culture. Zimmern has sat down for frog legs and sauce piquante cooked on open flame in Chef Donald Link’s family rice field in Mowata, Louisiana, and realized the rice he was eating was from last year’s crop out of that field, and the frogs were the ones he had caught the night beforehand. “The real Louisiana food culture from 50, 60, 100, 200 years ago is still available,” he says. “It just depends on how far you want to drive and where you want to see it. You just don’t get a chance to do that everywhere.”

Why has Louisiana’s food developed so definitively different from the rest of the country? Zimmern thinks New Orleans is like other cities that are similarly geographically situated that become melting pots for food techniques. Things tend to come and stay here as a result of visitors from all over the world, from South and Central America, the Caribbean Islands, China, Indonesia, from slave trade. All of these travelers influenced the food and took things away to incorporate into their own food traditions. Combined with those who came down on the Mississippi River from the north, there is a huge convergence of everything from French technique to backwoods smarts. “Soy sauce was a strange ingredient in 18th Century New York, but I would imagine if you opened up the occasional cupboard in small town Port Orleans, you would’ve without a doubt found soy sauce and curry powder,” he says. “New Orleans is one of those gorgeous repositories for those that are into food anthropology.”

That give and take means many dishes seemingly unique to Louisiana can be found in many different forms across the globe. One might wonder how different jambalaya really is from Spain’s paella, Italy’s risotto, South Asia’s biryani or West Africa’s jollof rice. Ponce is not only similar to Scottish haggis, but Zimmern discovered that the idea of organ meat cooked in a bladder crossed more cultures than he expected on a wildebeest hunt with tribal folk in Namibia. They chopped up some meat, eyeballs, ears, and pieces of liver, stuck it inside the stomach, poured ashes on top of it and put it in the fire to cook. “Flash forward and I’m in Mowata in a general store run by one of Don Link’s uncles, a man named Bubba Frey. He had one of the best versions of that dish. They’re eating boudin at Bubby Frey’s general store, and I show him Korean rice sausage, soondae. People in Korea can’t believe they’re doing that in Louisiana, and people in Louisiana can’t believe that’s one of the national dishes in Korea.”

That sentiment is at the heart of Zimmern’s show—to redefine the word “bizarre” and expand the American state of mind and taste palate. “I realized at a very early age that pickiness is relative,” he says. “I feel very strongly that in a world where we are always defining each other by our differences and often arguing with our tablemates, that we can celebrate the things we have in common. Food is a great way to do that.”

Christine and Dana Honn of Carmo. Photo by Renee Bienvenu.

After an overindulgent holiday season, the start of a new year marks an appropriate time for your body and palate to break completely from the norm, resolve to eat a few more salads and a lot less steak, and cast away for cuisines unbeknownst to you. For that, we direct you to Carmo, a tropical café tucked away in the heart of the CBD.

What is tropical cuisine, you ask? Your guess is as good as ours. To paraphrase their website, the food at Carmo travels the trade routes from Europe to Africa across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and South America. To this multi-cultural backdrop, owners Dana and Christine Honn (partners both in business and in life) have added their overarching commitment to sustainability, which involves using local organic produce whenever possible, biodegradable supplies, and offering vegan and vegetarian options for nearly every item on the menu. The result is a restaurant which we can best describe with a string of abstract adjectives: different, interesting, and strangely good.

Salads at Carmo are a mélange of fruits and vegetables in unfamiliar combinations. The house special is Jaciara’s Salpicao—don’t worry, the menu includes the English translation of “Brazilian chicken salad”—which is comprised of chunked chicken, turkey and ham, mixed with raisins, peas, cucumbers, peppers, cheese and shoestring potatoes in a creamy house dressing. The potatoes tend to lose their crunch too quickly, but the fresh veggies provide enough texture to the final dish that is surprisingly sweet but also includes a sneaky suspicion of spice.

The lunch menu includes typical deli sandwiches for those afraid of the unknown, but the offbeat combinations of bread and meat are far more rewarding. Banquette Breads include sweet and savory built upon thin and crispy Armenian flat bread. Other sandwiches include no bread at all, like the Rico, an open-faced sandwich whose foundation is a dense patty of mashed plantain, topped with pulled pork of impressive smokiness, especially coming from a kitchen which offers a variety of vegan options. Pao de queijo are Brazil’s answer to France’s gougeres, with a texture like a Southern baked biscuit.

Daily specials usually include a soup and an entree. On a recent visit, dudhi kofta, a cousin of falafel made with ground peanuts and bottle gourd squash, was plated atop rice and covered in a fragrant, spice-laden tomato curry. Gravy and rice for the vegan set, but a great dish nevertheless.

All of these delights are served from a small storefront in a building that’s as versatile as they come. The same space has been utilized for early morning boot camps and as an art gallery. While the substance on the plate and the surroundings may be strange and exotic, being capable to define either is not a prerequisite for enjoying them.

527 Julia St. (504) 875-4132. Lunch: Monday – Saturday, 11:30 a.m. – 3 p.m.; Dinner: Tuesday – Saturday, 5 p.m. – 10 p.m.

Nathan Allen of Luke Starkiller Hits the Spot at The Beach House. Photo by Caitlyn Ridenour.

The Beach House
2401 North Woodlawn Avenue
(504) 456-7470

What’s your usual order from here?

I usually get these wings, I special-order them and they’re extremely hot. The chef puts some ghost pepper in the sauce, which is one of the world’s hottest peppers.

Tell me about steak night?

Every Thursday night, they have 16-ounce handcut rib-eyes and fries for pretty cheap. This is actually my first time making it for steak night.

How did you first find this place?

A buddy of mine introduced me to the bartender and we started talking about food and I learned they stay open until around 7 in the morning, which are perfect hours for me.

The Gravy: In the Kitchen with June Yamagishi. Photo by Elsa Hahne.

“In Japan, we eat the golden-fried pork chop, tonkatsu. I don’t make that. I use a soy sauce base that is fruity and sweet, with apple, ginger and honey. This is the secret: Sake! Makes it sweet; makes meat tender.

When I’m in a restaurant, I always sit at the bar to see the cook and learn. Camellia Grill, they cook inside the counter and I like to sit down and stare.

When you grind your ginger, don’t peel it! With the skin. More flavor. John Gros can cook too! His gumbo is excellent, and we always gather, once every year, at John’s house, and bring a dish. I bring golden curry, curry with rice. Not Indian curry! My curry is Japanese style. More close to stew, with chicken, beef or pork, whatever you like. I don’t put much mushroom. I put onion, carrot and potato. Onion is most important. Cooking the onion first, about 20 minutes, make it caramel brown, kind of make it shrink. I use this sauce mix, Japanese roux, “Golden Curry”, and I put carrot chunks, potato chunks, put the water and boil for one hour. Before that, put seasoning stuff. Salt and pepper, and I use Tony Chachere’s a lot. When I do beef, I fry the beef in butter first. When I add the water, I add the beef back in.

My secret ingredients are this fruit sauce [Bull-Dog Vegetable & Fruit Sauce, Semi-Sweet] and this Japanese version of Worcestershire sauce, with tamarind. You can put it on steak, anything. Give it secret flavor.

Let me tell you my story. I was moving down here in 1995. Around that time, not many Japanese people lived here in New Orleans. I couldn’t find Japanese groceries, this kind of sauce stuff. And I wanted to eat it. I wanted this kind of flavor. I make it! Worcestershire sauce and ketchup, mixed up. That’s close.

When I go back to my home town, there’s a butcher close to my house. I always go there and get the fried beef croquettes. I love it! That’s my favorite. Ground beef with mashed potato, carrot, onion—same as for curry, but chopped up. Put together and put breading, panko, and deep-fry. I’m from a town close to Osaka, and Osaka is the food capital in Japan, like New Orleans. Anything is great, and cheap! I’ve been eating beef croquettes since I was two years old.

I learned to cook from my grand-mère. First time I get here and eat the red beans and rice, it reminds me of my grand-mère’s cooking. She always used the red beans. That’s why I moved down here. Because of my grand-mère’s red beans.

I started cooking when I moved to New Orleans. Makes me feel like cook. I cooked when I lived in Japan, but mostly I cooked New Orleans stuff; gumbo and jambalaya. When I moved down here, I really started cooking for myself: ‘Yeah, let’s cook this!’ But I don’t need to cook gumbo and jambalaya here. I cook in the Japanese style.

My home town Ise is by the sea with a lot of great seafood and special beef. Best beef in Japan, better than Kobe beef. Unbelievable; melt in your mouth. Ise shrimp, Ise ebi, is very good. I always hung out by the sea and the river as a kid. That’s familiar to me.

I like deep-fried shrimp. Shrimp cutlets, like Tiger shrimp. Peel it, open it and stretch out, like tempura, golden-fried with panko. Then I put this sauce, the fruit sauce, with mayo, mixed together.

I like complicated stuff. Complex stuff is crab cream croquettes with the bechamel sauce, your white sauce. That’s very hard to make. I try and try and try—still can’t make it. They’re too soft, they won’t make a chunk. You chill it in the refrigerator to make it more firm, then you cut it and deep-fry in panko. Outside flaky, inside creamy. That’s a problem. Just bechamel sauce and crab meat. Very hard! When I put it in the oil to fry, it breaks. Too soft! I have to guess.

Jason [Mingledorff] wrote a song and we were in Colorado before we cut the second album with Papa Grows Funk. We stayed in a condo, everybody. ‘Yeah, let’s cook something.’ ‘Hey, June, can you cook the yakiniku?’ Like Korean barbecue. ‘I’ll do that. No problem. Bring me to some store.’ But I couldn’t get yakiniku sauce, so I had to make a temporary sauce with soy sauce and sake and sugar. And then Jason said, ‘Hey guys, what do you think about this song’s title?’ I said, ‘What about the yakiniku?’ And that was it. And then I put the ingredients in the liner notes.”

Japanese Pork Chops

1 tablespoon grated fresh ginger
1 small apple, grated
2 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoons mirin
4 tablespoons sake
6 tablespoons soy sauce
2 center-cut pork chops
salt, pepper and Tony Chachere’s
1/2 cup flour
2 tablespoons olive oil

In a bowl, stir together ginger, apple, honey, mirin, sake and soy sauce. Set aside. Season pork chops with salt, pepper and Tony Chachere’s on both sides and press into flour in a wide bowl. Fry pork chops on both sides in olive oil over medium heat for about 3 minutes per side, covering pan with a lid after the first minute. Pour sauce over meat and continue to cook for 2 minutes, turning the meat in the sauce.

Photo by Renee Bienvenu.

The holiday season is accompanied by many traditions such as lighting candles, decorating trees, and participating in feats of strength. Perhaps no holiday tradition is as much fun and delicious as a trip to Martin Wine Cellar to stock up on liquid libations, that most important holiday essential without which we could not survive an afternoon of listening to Uncle Leo wax on about cousin Jeffrey’s meteoric rise through the communications division of the parks department. While Martin’s (as the name has been corrupted) is traditionally known as a place to stock up on burgundy and bourbon, the attached deli has created its own identity as one of the city’s most popular lunch spots.

The menu has expanded into the “bistro” category, but sandwiches are still the lifeblood of what has always been one of the city’s best delis. The kitchen does best with pastrami and corned beef, which are combined together on the Deli Deluxe with melted Swiss cheese on a soft onion roll slathered with Russian dressing and Creole mustard. Smoked salmon is either served classically on a toasted H&H bagel smeared with cream cheese or decadently paired with crisp bacon and wasabi mayo between slices of sourdough. Avoid the Lindy, whose incomplete flavor profile is a result of Russian dressing obfuscated behind bland cole slaw and tasteless turkey.

The list of sandwiches is supplemented by a specials menu that features a singular soup, salad, sandwich, pizza, burger and entrée of the day. Cooler weather means soups are finally an acceptable form of insulation, and Martin’s iteration of tortilla soup was thicker than most of that genre and chock full of tomatoes with a heavy dose of cumin. The daily entrée choices range from seared scallops to Monday’s staple of red beans and rice served with a fat link of spicy sausage. The beans begged for a strong shot of hot sauce, but don’t they all?

The refrigerated display case includes a cornucopia of cold salads, including a delicious Oriental noodle salad whose heft comes by way of a judicious use of sesame oil. Freshly baked cookies and cakes by the slice are available as finishing touches to the meal. If a glass of wine is in order, you may order by the glass or pull any bottle off the shelf, putting at your disposal perhaps the largest virtual wine list in town, and with no corkage fee.

In response to increasing demand, Martin’s has recently expanded into early dinner service, with the kitchen closing at 8 p.m., and Sunday brunch service is more popular than ever. The neighborhood wine store has come a long way since its founding in 1946. But history may come full circle later next year, when hopeful patrons look forward to once again lunching on a Baronne Beast back at the original location on Baronne Street.

714 Elmeer Avenue. (504) 896-7350. Monday – Friday, 9 a.m. – 8 p.m.; Saturday, 9 a.m. – 5 p.m.; Sunday, 10 a.m. – 3 p.m.

Shannon Powell Hits the Spot at Willie Mae's Scotch House. Photo by Caitlyn Ridenour.

Willie Mae’s Scotch House
2401 St. Ann Street
(504) 822-9503

How long have you been coming here?

For about 20 years or so. I think they’ve been open for about 60 years.

So everyone around here has gotten to know you pretty well?

Oh yeah. Well, all these people just started working here after Katrina when the great-granddaughter took over, but before Katrina it was just Ms. Willie Mae and her great-granddaughter in the kitchen.

What do you usually get from here?

The fried chicken is the best in the world, and they have some good white beans. They’re so delicious. They also have a great breaded pork chop. Yes, indeed.

So, why do they call it a scotch house?

Years ago, the middle part was a little bar and the restaurant was up front and way in the back her daughter had a beauty parlor.

The Gravy: In the Kitchen with Bill Summers. Photo by Elsa Hahne.

“I have a system, and I like to stick to it—it’s not having one. This is an expensive meal, this. It cost me $50 to buy all this stuff. I like to cook with palm oil, and it’s really not good for you. It’s saturated. So I cut it with olive oil, which is good for you. It’s the taste of the palm oil I want. It really has a flavor, and you can capture the flavor without having too much of it.

This doesn’t take long to cook. It needs to be a fish that’s not going to fall apart. And I use mushrooms to substitute for meat and make the dish more bountiful, so you can feed more people. This is a Yoruban dish. The person who taught me how to make this is from Nigeria. But I’ve put my own twist to it, because my relatives are from Louisiana, as far back as the 1700s. Donaldsonville, Napoleonville, Plaquemines; my family comes off of the plantation called Belle Helene, also called the Ashland plantation. I represent the black side of the Kenner family, which no one talks about. Two brothers, Duncan Kenner and George Kenner, owned the plantation. George Kenner is my great great grandfather. My great great grandmother, who was a slave, had seven kids by him.

I like to put honey in this, a little Oshun. It’s not in the recipe the guy gave me, but I tried it. Just to sweeten it a little, and it does something. Also, he didn’t put shrimp in it. I’m putting shrimp in this, with the fish. I’ve even taken the same dish and put sausage in it, and that made it taste even better. This is an African dish and it’s really close to things that are cooked here in New Orleans, with the exception of the palm oil.

You know Big Chief Donald Harrison? I use some of his tricks. When he makes gumbo, and I know because we spent a lot of time on the road together, everything he puts in it, he cooks it so it tastes good before he puts it in the gumbo. Sausage, he doesn’t just drop it into the gumbo; he cooks it in a skillet. He takes the shrimp and cook them first, then put them in. Even the crabs. And it makes a big difference.

You don’t want to stir this. You just shake the pot like the washing machine, so the fish will stay whole. And the spinach just sits on top.

And now we’re going to make fufu. Fufu, better explained, is F-U, F-U [laughs]. I really can’t tell you, and spelling it doesn’t sound good, I’m saying some bad words to you. I don’t know. It’s pounded yam, and I got this powder from the same guy who brought me the palm oil. I think it’s an acquired taste. I don’t think it’s something that people necessarily like, but I just like African food.

You know what I think? I think when black people came here to the States, their substitute for fufu was grits. I really do. I think there’s a serious similarity in preparing the grits and this, and some people like their grits thick, like fufu.

What I really like about the fufu is that you eat it with your fingers. When I grew up, you couldn’t eat with your fingers. You had to use a fork and knife. So just the thrill of being able to stick my hands in it, I think that’s one of the reasons.

The trick with fufu is mixing it, getting the water to accept it. I have no idea how much water I have in here, I just add as much powder as I need. Now we have a volcano going on. Here’s the thing—you have to get all the dryness out of it, all the little lumps, which is why I don’t particularly like the fufu process. It’s kind of rough. For this to be ready, I have to work it. When the pot is taller, you can mash it up against the side, but this takes a good fifteen minutes. You have to keep on until it’s smooth. You smash it and smash it. I have seen people work this stuff for a good half hour to forty-five minutes. Fufu will keep you strong! If I had to make this to order, I would have a fufu-less restaurant. It’s tedious. But God, talk about good!”

Eja Eba (Yoruban Fish Stew)

2 tablespoons palm oil
2 tablespoons olive oil
5 tilapia fillets, cut in half
1 pack mushrooms, sliced
1 pound peeled shrimp
1 cup water 1 (29-ounce) can tomato sauce
1 (6-ounce) can tomato paste
2 habañero peppers, finely minced
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons honey
1/2 pound fresh spinach

Fry tilapia fillets in palm oil and olive oil until done. Remove fish from pan and set aside. Fry mushrooms, then set aside. Fry shrimp, and set aside. Deglaze the pan with water, and mix with tomato sauce and tomato paste. Bring sauce to a slow boil. Add peppers, salt and honey. Simmer for 10 minutes. Gently place fish, shrimp and mushrooms into sauce. Do not stir—just shake the pot. Simmer for 5 minutes. Place spinach leaves on top, turn off the heat and cover the pot—do not stir the spinach in, it should just steam on top. Serve with fufu, or rice.

Note: Instead of mincing the habañeros, you can put them in whole to get some of the flavor but almost no heat, and then simply remove them before adding the fish.