Boiled Rice is mostly eaten with Red stew in Nigeria, that's the most popular way of eating boiled rice. But some of us also eat rice with Egusi (Melon) soup might be new to some Nigerians while others might enjoy it as much as I do. So in this most I'll share how I made Egusi soup the vegan style.
The last time we visited the farm, we found lots of Egusi plants and we gathered every seed and took it home to be processed.
How we process it?
- We cut it open and get the yellow seeds inside
We wash the seeds thoroughly and spread it out in the sun to dry
When it is very dry we start to peel the back off then we have it ready to be used for food.
So the above process is what we did to achieve our peeled melon ready to be used for food.
So for our Egusi soup/stew I used the following ingredients:
Ingredients
- 1 cup Egusi
- 1 Cooking spoon palm oil
- 3 small balls of onions
- Dried grounded pepper
- Salt to taste
- 3 Dried ginger
- Fluted pumpkin leave
I got only a little pumpkin leaves from our little garden, it's not fully grown yet, soon we'll have a lot...
So here's the process I took in cooking the Egusi soul/stew:
Procedure
- Since there's no electricity yet in the village and the solar light has not yet been fixed, I had to use mortar to pound the egusi. But using a blender or grinder will be easier but they're not available at the moment so I used our mortar to pound.
Below is how it looks after pounding or grinding:
- I also used the mortar to pound the ginger
- Next I chopped the onions and the vegetable leaves.
- I soaked the ground Egusi and added some onions to it
- I got a pot, heat it up and add the palm oil to it. I also add the onions and sauteed it.
- Next thing I added was the Egusi paste and I stirred it well to allow it to mix well in the oil. I also allow the Egusi to dry well.
- While in the process of drying I add the pepper, salt and ground ginger to it and I stir.
- Being sure that the Egusi is dry enough and ready I add the leaves to it and allow it to cook down in some seconds.
After this last step I stir the leaves in the soup and it is ready!
Here is how the soup looks in a bowl, very nice looking and really delicious too
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Next I was able to boil a little rice to eat with it...here below is the rice with the Egusi soup/stew....
We can also eat this soup with Nigeria Garri or Fufu, in fact this is the main thing Egusi is eaten with, Garri. But eating it with rice is a good thing and very delicious!
This is just the vegan style of this soup, the main one is cooked with lots of stock fish, meat, Kpomo, crayfish, Periwinkle etc.
Thank you for not missing any part of this recipe, I hope you liked it! See you guys in another post 🤗
