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As a Nigerian, my country is blessed with varieties of cultural and traditional dishes that sometimes you would think there would always be something to eat at any giving point. But this is not the case because in order to prepare such traditional dishes, a person has to get the necessary natural ingredients to prepare such delicacies. To get these, you have to go to the local market to get the ingredients such as vegetables, fish, meats, spices like curry, Thyme, rosemary, paprika, garlic, ginger and so on. Eating such meals can be delicious and fulfilling but getting the ingredients and preparing them by yourself can be tasking, often times this is why people settle for restaurants to satisfy their traditional cravings and this can be expensive.
I have had the opportunity of spending some years in one of the biggest Western cities in Nigeria which is Ibadan in Oyo state. As we are all aware, Ibadan is known for their traditional and cultural cuisine which is the Amala coupled with Gbegiri and ewedu soup, a very delicious delicacy at that. Although, back then as a student I did not have the opportunity and the resources to prepare the meal because it involves four separate dishes, we have the amala made separately we also have to prepare the stew, the locust bean sauce and the ewedu prepared all separately. So, rather than going through all that stress, we visit restaurants or Street bukas to satisfy our hunger.
In regards to the prompt by the Hivenaija community which states that we should recount the foods we have not eaten in a while, I had a nostalgic feeling about this delicacy. It's been about 4 to 5 years now since I had eaten that kind of meal and this is so because where I moved to is an entirely different environment that does not have the ingredients in place. The kind of food eating in this place is different from the Western culture, in the South here, we can find vegetables that can prepare the ewedu soup but it is difficult to get the other ingredients to prepare the other side soups to make the combination right.
I am a big fan of the okra soup and somehow due to the dry season it has been difficult to get natural native okra from the market rather what we see these days are the long ones that are strong and does not draw well in the soup. As a Yoruba lady, there is a special way we prepare our okra soup where we use ingredients so such as red oil, fish, meats, assorted, iru, ogi, stock and so on to make the soup because I am not talking about just boiling the okro and eating it with stew. Sometimes, the reasons why we don't prepare some kind of dishes every time is because they are not in season during the rainy season the ingredients are in abundance but once the dry season sets in they become scarce and expensive.
In summary, the foods I have not eaten a while and I miss is the Amala and ewedu dish, okro soup, pounded yam, black soup, banga soup, ankara fried in red oil and so on and so forth.
This is a part of my entry for the #Januaryinleo prompt as organized by the 
COMPLIMENT OF THE SEASON FAM🎉🎄🎉🎄
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