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.
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup vegetable or olive oil
- 4 cloves garlic
- 1 large onion
- 1 large potato
- 1 large turnip
- 1 carrot
- 2 large sweet potatoes
- 2 tablespoons tomato paste
- 1 tablespoon smoked paprika
- 1/2 tablespoon cayenne pepper (optional)
- 1/2 tablespoon cumin
- 2 fresh thyme sprigs
- 2 cups cooked garbanzo beans (or 1 15-ounce can garbanzo beans), drained and rinsed
- Fine salt and freshly ground black pepper
- 4 cups stock of your choice or water
- 2 Tbsp fish sauce, optional
- 3/4 cup creamy, natural peanut butter
- parsley for garnish
Instructions
- Finely chop the garlic and dice the onions. Peel and cut the potato, turnip, carrot, and sweet potato into ½ inch cubes.
- In a large, heavy pot over medium heat, heat the oil until shimmering and add the onions and garlic. Cook 2-3 minutes (until onions are transparent), then add the paprika, cayenne pepper and cumin and cook one more minute. Add the root vegetables, tomato paste, thyme sprigs, chickpeas, salt and black pepper.
- Mix well. Cover and bring to boil. Reduce the heat and simmer until the veggies are tender, 20 to 25 minutes.
- Turn off the heat but leave the pot on the stove.
- Stir in the peanut butter and fish sauce, mix well and let sit for 5 minutes before serving.
- Sprinkle with chopped parsley and serve with jasmine or basmati rice.
Notes
Adapted from the Cooking Channel’s “West African’s Finest Mafe” recipe.
