Caboose

The other night Suleiman came round to show me how to cook tuwon shinkafa. This is a popular staple food in northern Nigeria, one of the many different types of starchy blob. Shinkafa is the Hausa word for rice and tuwo is the generic term for starchy blobs.

It’s always eaten with some kind of soup (i.e. stew), in this case we made a sort of egusi soup, with ground pumpkin seeds. I’d been to the market and bought shinkafan tuwo (tuwo rice) and all the other ingredients the day before.

Here’s Suleiman cooking the soup and the finished product:

It came out well, although the rice could have probably done with a little more cooking to form into balls properly. I don’t often buy meat or fish, as I can’t rely on my fridge to keep food for very long, so the egusi soup had tinned tuna in instead.

The next day I realised Suleiman had probably added too much chili, I suffered from a distint burning sensation (as Marebec would put it).