Celebrate Food Adventures: Mafe – An African Stew
During the years I was lucky enough to get “stuck” in France, I picked up a lot of practical, food-related lifestyle insights: meals are good, snacking is not; if you feed your kids in courses, veggies first, the veggies get eaten; it is alarmingly easy to buy a bad baguette in Paris—better to commit your neighborhood’s “good” boulangerie’s apparently arbitrary schedule to memory.
The French really know the ins and outs of food. Maybe it was the wine, but I’d swear I never ate a disappointing meal while there. If they can’t put something worthwhile on the table, they prefer not to eat.
That’s why it seems counter-intuitive that among all the delicious dishes I sampled while there, perhaps my favorite is Mafe (mah fay), a hearty Senegalese peanut stew often available in the North African cafes of larger cities.
Traditionally made with lamb or other meat, I prefer to make Mafe as a vegetarian dish, rich with meaty root vegetables. As with most stews, many variations will work (skip the turnips and up the sweet potatoes, saute some sweet peppers with the onions, throw some torn kale in towards the end), but the stars here remain the chick peas and peanut butter. Though it sounds like an exotic combination, if you grew up with peanut butter as a staple like me and still crave its comforting and childhood-memory-inducing qualities, you’ll love this dish in any of its incarnations.
After graduating Bentonville High School and Hendrix College, Paula spent many years out of the area, including time in Key West, New York City, London, New York and Paris. After the birth of their two boys, she returned to family and Bentonville, where, with her husband Frederic. She now owns and operates Crepes Paulette, a popular local food truck, with a storefront Crepes Paulette coming soon to “southern” downtown Bentonville.