Chicken suya, an emetic aid

A review from the start

A review is subjectively a random stranger's opinion of an experience they've had. I never think of an experience as one where I've been selected to receive the good or the bad of a service. This is why I take reviews seriously: the experience of many averages out to net good, net bad, or neither good nor bad.

Having a desire for something spicy, I tried to access a website on my phone. I'd forgotten it wasn't mobile-friendly; you could select all you wanted, but you'd never be presented with the checkout button because it was obscured by other webpage elements.

Now, consider this: you have an account on the said website and, having logged in and made your order, you'd expect that order to be retained for a session on another device with the same credentials. Perish the thought.

It did not get better

I made my order, supplied my phone number, email address, and home address with a view to collecting it from the shop rather than opting for home delivery. Even after paying through the banking system they offered, I got no confirmation of my order sent to any of the personal details I'd shared. I had to take a screenshot as confirmation.

Then I called an Uber to take me to the shop, and for the second time, I arrived before my order was registered on their system. My screenshot and banking transaction confirm I have a bona fide order.

Only now, what I'd ordered had run out, and I was offered an unappealing alternative that, for the journey I'd made, I tolerated. Soon, I was given my takeaway, which was a lower price compared to what I'd wanted. A bit of back and forth ensued before he realised I was due some change.

I've never suffered worse

When I tucked into it as I walked back home, it was nothing like I'd expected. I would have enjoyed a Nando's takeaway for less, with two sides and a lot of tasty bits to eat. Chicken suya is no substitute for beef suya, even on the worst of days.

And Suya Republic, Chester Road, you missed a treat: the apparently XL portion was as parsimonious as a chicken on Ozempic, and having to quibble for change when you couldn't fulfil the order I'd originally paid for was unfortunate. I'll remember this long enough not to grace your stoep with my interest again.

My lesson learnt

Never pay upfront. Have enough time to wait for your order at the shop when you visit. The food is good enough; the service, however, is tolerable to abysmal.

Alright, I happened upon this place on one of my wanderings around Manchester. This was my fifth visit.

Chicken Licken unsafe in Ejigbo

Ideas from mother

I do wonder if those who dare me to write about them on my blog are indirectly asking to be written about. The conversation is usually topical enough to find a few lines of interest. Whatever, the idea sown, until it is executed, it stands alone.

Like this morning, I called to chat to my mother, who answered her phone with strict formality, I had to say, this is your son calling. She was no doubt pranking me as we exchanged greetings and got a message to her that I should have done, a couple of days ago.

Chickens lost and found

During our conversation, we were interrupted by a neighbour who had apparently come round into her compound looking for their chicken, though, I did not ask if it was a cockerel or a hen. Whilst chickens do stray into neighbouring compounds, my mother said two of her chickens never returned home.

One would not want to suggest the neighbours have been chicken-napping, but chickens are intelligent enough to know their way back home except if by happenstance they have met an expected end at the hands of someone else. Chickens that free-range into my mother’s compound are safe from danger, and that is why neighbours can expect to collect their flock if they have strayed there.

There was Chicken Licken

This brought me to the idea of giving one’s poultry names, and though one cannot vouch for the mental capacity of the galline (adjective for chicken) flock to have individual identities, there might be possibilities therein.

It would ensure that when chickens wander off, they can be called by name, just as one would any of the canine kennel and have then cluck and chuck back home long before they are stewing in strange neighbouring pots. Honest neighbours matter, but hungry neighbours make chickens an endangered species.

Perfecting my lessons in kitchen banditry

Ila Alasepo

A mouthful of chicken

Imitation they say is the best form of flattering and there is one act I have learnt too well from my dad and uncle. When I was out at the ethnic shop last Tuesday, I bought a kilo of chicken gizzards and another kilo of chicken drumsticks, this apart from the whole leg of lamb that I asked to be cut with the meat chainsaw.

I cooked the chicken first and then grilled it in the hope that it would be used in a simple tomato stew. The gizzard was supposed to be destined for a mix of gizzard and diced plantains in a chilli sauce. The grilling had considerably dried the chicken that it could keep for a while before use.

As I took the chicken out of the oven to make way for the grilling of the cooked lamb pieces, I left the drumsticks and gizzards in a bowl by the stove taking a bite or two of the gizzards, then the drumsticks and watched the contents depleting at the inspiration of my dad and uncle who usually stole into the kitchen at home as if to offer some help and escape with a piece of meat as a basic snack.

Cravings for something spicy

Obviously, one should not be surprised that a few rodent visits to the kitchen can change the quantity of ingredients laid aside for another purpose. Then yesterday, I decided I wanted to make Ila Alasepo, a variation on stewed okra, but not as fancifully decadent as the recipes. I had bought the okra as frozen, cut rings of fresh okra, bagged and frozen, it was the first time I would use it. Then out of the freezer, I took out 4 distinct kinds of chilli to be defrosted along with spicily hot scotch bonnets, all of which I blended this morning.

I had a bag of dried catfish cuts that I steamed for an hour, then prepared the pepper stew separately from the okra, before pouring everything in one pot and simmering until ready. By the time I knew things were done, all the chicken drumsticks and gizzards had undergone no further transformation apart from the mastication of my mandibles.

Then I wondered how this could be, the only excuse I had was I learnt to do this from my mentoring dad and uncle. I guess next time, I will just buy 2 kilos each just to forestall a mishap like this again.

Ingredients

Frozen okra fingers as chopped rings

Palm oil

Green bell pepper

Scotch bonnet chillies (use according to preference)

Jalapeños

Long green chilli peppers

Diced onions

Salt to taste

Lamb stock from previously cooked lamb

Lamb pieces

Dried catfish cutlets steamed before use

Kaun – potash for the initial preparation of the okra

Seasoning with herbs, I don’t use seasoning cubes in my cooking.

You can follow the recipe with these limited ingredients or extend them as needed.

Nando's: Poorly run and rundown round the corner

Cravings for the simple

I have my fast food cravings that I indulge every once in a while and I get it at Nando’s a restaurant chain founded in South Africa serving a Mozambican-Portuguese fare based around chicken.

So I stepped out of my home to visit the Nando’s round the corner, since it was close and I discovered that just a few weeks before.

It was not a good experience, I was in and out within 10 minutes having hardly taken a bite of my chicken before logging on the Nando’s website to express my disgust at the place, the service and much else. They asked for feedback and they got the whole lot of lock, stock and two smoking barrels of irately annoyed.

At the end of the multiple choice interactive questions where most answers tended towards the dissatisfied and strongly dissatisfied, I was offered a free-form text box to give them a piece of my mind below:

Feedback the rotten tack

The staff was sullen and unwelcoming, barely interacted when I got there apart from asking if I had been to Nando's before.

The cable on the PIN machine was all screwed up, simple attention to detail like that became the revelation of bigger problems.

As I went to get a plate and cutlery, a complete order had the receipt slip put on the food, when my order arrived it was all piled up on one plate with the ramekin of coleslaw sitting on my chips, that was just disgusting, I was speechless up to a minute.

Though the waiter offered to replace my order, I kept it, but one taste of the chicken was enough and I just walked out literally leaving the food untouched.

This is the WORST Nando's I have ever been to ever, tables had bits on them and I had to dust off my seat, it is a poorly run and rundown place, it needs many new things from personnel to the look of the place - probably parachute in a manager from one of your better run restaurants to sort this place out.

A disgrace...

Then again

On that note, I still had a craving for a Nando’s still, so I went to another restaurant right in the centre of town where everything was an improvement on the last that it would not have bothered me if one thing was out of place.

Thinking of it, it might just as been the attitude of the staff at the other place that made for my seeing every minor thing wrong in that restaurant, but it goes without saying, I can excuse many things except with it comes to the service, the personality and the engagement that makes a restaurant experience worthwhile.

I do not go to eat out to take aggro with my food, no matter how gracious I am feeling. That is what I had to tell a French waiter in Paris many years ago when he seemed to feel a bit unhappy with his day that he felt he could take that out on the customers, I was ready to leave and by the time I had warned him to behave, he had lost the prospect of a generous tip.

Kemi: Suya Master in London

Update from Kemi: Orders are currently only taken for parties, functions and special occasions; in due course when premises are acquired, retail orders will be serviced. 

Nostalgia of tastes

Now, I have had my share of suya to the point that I can consider myself a connoisseur. From the times over 2 decades ago that I will stop my taxi on Airport Road, Ikeja where suya chefs with almost other-worldly culinary expertise would wield knives like scimitars slicing the beef off the skewers and then cutting them to bits through their fingers with such ease you wondered how they ever returned home with their fingers intact.

Sprinkled with dried spice and some onions and wrapped in paper, your choice of beverage depending on your palate completed what could easily be the meal of kings.

Once I was tempted to have it in London but when I saw unthawed beef go from freezer to fire at the London August carnival I was back-tracking so fast, I could have fallen over backwards hitting my head in utter disbelief.

Suya I have tried in other places and they have been passable, manageable with me just an arm’s length away from a sick bag but for my strong constitution.

Reliving quality suya

Then I visited my cousin Kemi who apart from her many creative talents in the arts and fashion had like any serious foodie would do found out the reason why suya in England was nowhere near the experience of tasty heaven we used to have in Nigeria.

We have seen enough of the bastardisation of our foods to presumably suit what we think are Western tastes and in the process lost the essence of the originality of our foods, just as many ethnic foods in Europe taste nothing like the foods back where they originated – it is a travesty.

I was offered suya and nostalgia collided with reality on my taste-buds, for Kemi had produced the quality of suya that if there were such a title, she would well be a Suya Master, not necessarily with the knife-wielding dare-devilry but she’ll pass the authentic suya test with bonus points by reason of satisfaction.

Choices to order

The suya magic can be applied to beef, chicken, gizzards, tripe, goat meat or chicken hearts, the attention to process and product is exquisite with an order/delivery area of East London that should expand in time.

The business is growing and you can tantalise your taste-buds and salivate in expectation by joining the I Love Suya Facebook Group or Liking the MamaSuya page – the pictures are untouched and representative of what you will get – I present, Kemi – Suya Master Extraordinaire.

Place an order and know that you can delay returning to Nigeria for the taste of authentic suya.

Pink Slime: What you can eat may not be food

Raising the Yuck Factor

I cannot say I am one to be overtaken by food scares that fill our headlines from day to day but I do worry when the way our food is derived departs from as it were standard procedures to concoctions that make Frankenstein plasticine play.

In all honesty, I should be unconcerned with the uproar about “pink slime” because I never use minced beef in my cooking and rarely ever eat meals that have minced beef as part of the ingredients.

“Pink Slime” or to give its it more fanciful name - Lean Finely Textured Beef – plumbs the depths of sick-making yuck that could have you filling sick-bags with more than the contents of your stomach.

Taking science beyond food

As the story goes, some food industry genius thought after beef was cut off the bone there was still too much being discarded and he came up with the process of heating the beef trimmings in centrifuges to separate the fat from the meat, the exposing the product to ammonium gas to kill bacteria and this is mixed with ground beef in what Beef Products Inc. (hardly reminiscent of your dear grandma’s kitchen in name or purpose) might have called the triumph of economics and science over waste.

Reading this is stomach churning enough for my somewhat rigid constitution but what makes it alarming is the way the food industry has subsumed the regulators who trot out the idea that this whole thing is safe.

I will however contend that just because the processing of food is safe does not mean it is fit for purpose; the safety of processing must not just be demonstrated but it must be seen to not to take the Yuck Factor to the point of chronic emesis.

These unnatural things

Indeed, one must commend Jamie Oliver [1] for exposing this atrocious travesty that takes the nutritious and edible out of food leaving it just barely amenable to mastication with our digestive systems struggling to derive any nutrients before the muck is passed out our bodies made more susceptible to unknown attacks having not evolved to the chemistry necessary to process this stuff.

It is bad enough to learn that beef is treated with carbon monoxide [2] to prevent its natural browning due to rancidity or to note the rise of Frankenstein Sugars [3], but nothing prepared me for when I read that beef from a cow apparently suffering from Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy [4] (BSE) or “Mad Cow’s Disease” ended up in 8 states and the Island of Guam [5].

What is real?

There is no reason to touch the topic of Mechanically Recovered Meat [6] if you have not filled three sick bags already, but when you realise that sausages and chicken nuggets from conveyor-belt mass-market and cheap outlets do not lend themselves to traditional methods your begin to wonder what else is sacred about our food.

This is not to say that there is no need to find ways to improve quality and yield for food products be they plant or animal derived but the tampering with natural processes to do with colour, texture, taste and unnatural derivations has to be more tightly regulated and probably stopped, besides, with the certificates of food-worthiness given by food agencies we are left to better trust our instincts than allow for these compromised agencies in cahoots with the Food Industrial Complex to certify products stray dogs might well sniff at.

Debunking Myths

According to Snopes.com [7], McDonald’s stopped using mechanically recovered meat in Chicken McNuggets in 2003. When I feel better, I might be tempted to try it again.

Sources

[1] BBC News - Could 'pink slime' be rebranded?

[2] Akin Akintayo: The beauty of the dead cow

[3] Akin Akintayo: The rise of the Frankenstein Sugars

[4] Bovine spongiform encephalopathy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[5] Akin Akintayo: Cult of the Mad Cow

[6] Mechanically separated meat - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[7] snopes.com: Pink Slime and Mechanically Separated Chicken

Childhood: The fruits of a chicken napping dog

Fruits of many trees

When we finally moved to Jos and settled in the suburb of Rayfield, we had a full house with Unculu (my paternal uncle) and other relations of my father that included his niece and kid sister.

Our colonial bungalow was set in grounds that included an orchard of mango trees, a lemon tree, a fig tree, a cashew tree, a few orange trees and lots of grazing ground for cattle.

There was a separate garage for the car and a block of rooms set aside about a minute’s walk from the main building which was the boy’s quarters – a colonial definition of apartments for servants.

Blood of thieves

Besides the help we had from our relations we had a maid servant who despite her work was offered the opportunity of schooling and a gardener who doubled as a watchman of sorts.

This however did not stop the watchman of being robbed once, where some of his family possessions were stolen and on one occasion a thief tried to gain entry to our house, broke and window pane and cut himself badly.

All the blood and the trail of blood from the scene of the crime was quite unsettling for me as a child, in fact, it was just as scary as when we found a bat squeaking in the kitchen sometime before.

Et tu Bruté?

However, one of the memories that stuck with me was of our very first dog, Brutus, a very nice cheerful dog that seemed to have a taste for chickens in the neighbourhood. One day when I was away at school, the people came round, chased the dog into the bushes which were downhill from the house some 500 metres away and ran a spear through it, as I was told.

Rumour has it; it ended up in some soup pots, the killers probably doing well to retrieve their chickens by eating the dog that ate their chickens.

It was something of a traumatic experience and it took a while before we got another dog that I named Scot after the dog Scot in the Janet and John books we read at school.

Beheading the chicken

Thankfully, Scot did not have a taste for chickens at all, considering we had quite a few chickens then on the grounds.

Every once in a while we chased a chicken to exhaustion for a meal, none of that frozen chicken stuff and I had been taught how to clamp the wings under one foot and have the feet under another foot, grab at the head, holding it up to reveal the neck and cut without necessarily decapitating the bird.

Once, I did cut the head completely off and did not let all the blood out or allow for the last breath, lifted my feet and got half chased by a headless chicken before it expired – thankfully, it did, because there was no way I would have tried to catch it after what had happened to it.

Imagine if the chicken ended up like Mike the headless chicken [Source: Mike the Headless Chicken - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia] which survived for 23 months, sometimes; the weirdest people do the craziest things and find a place in the Guinness Book of World Records.