This recipe comes from Chad—or République du Tchad—a country in west central Africa that was an important cultural and trading crossroads for many centuries. Notice that the word used for sweet potato is fairly close to the original batatas, and is a completely different word from the French for white potato (pomme de terre).
This dish [...]
Entries from March 2009
March 30, 2009
Salade de Patates Douces
March 26, 2009
The Original Potato
“What’s in a name?” Well, sometimes a good bit of confusion—take yams and sweet potatoes, for example. If you’re in the United States and you’re calling something a yam, odds are you’re talking about a sweet potato, in which case, you’re wrong. Sweet potatoes are members of the morning glory family. Yams, on the other [...]
March 16, 2009
Tortilla Española
Back in April of last year (April 23, to be exact), I wrote a bit about tapas and offered a recipe for datiles con tocino, a very popular tapa. There have been so many searches for this recipe that I thought perhaps another classic tapa might be in order—just in case you’re all throwing tapas [...]
March 6, 2009
Tagen Bamya
Last year, while traveling in southern Egypt, we visited an area largely occupied by Nubians. Nubia used to exist between Aswan (the first cataract in the Nile) and Khartoum (the fifth cataract), but Nubia has been absorbed by Egypt in the north and Sudan in the south. The Nubians were further displaced when the Aswan [...]
