Hi foodies 👋🏾, I'm here again today with another great dish (and amazing recipe) to share and today's dish is Banga Soup. Banga is also known as palm nut and preparing this means extracting the oil from the fruit and making a soup with it, this involves lots of strength and fire (that's one of the reasons I've not prepared it in a long time) but today, I prepared it using firewood because I'm in my parent's house and they're conserving gas 😁. Before I start talking about the stress, let me dive into the ingredients and method of preparation.
Ingredients
- Banga (palm nut)
- Dry fish
- Seasoning cubes
- Snail
- Esam (Periwinkle)
- Fresh pepper
- (Washed) bitter leaf
- Banga seasonings Beletete leaf, and mixed Banga spices
- Chicken feet (because my mom loves it)
- Processed octopus
- Fresh Fish
- Prawns
- Crayfish
- Salt
Banga
Dry fish
Snails in the shell
Snail
Esam (Periwinkle)
Fresh pepper
Washed bitter leaf
Banga seasoning
Chicken feet
Octopus
Fresh Fish
Prawns
Method of Preparation
The first thing to do while preparing Banga Soup is to boil the Banga (palm nuts) till the skin gets soft, (the nut itself cannot get soft so when the skin gets soft, that means it's time to take it to the next step). Secondly, I put the boiled Banga in a mortar and pounded it till the skin came off but careful enough to not break the nuts.
After pounding to my satisfaction, I used very little cold water to rinse out the oil then I used hot water next to rinse out the remaining oil and filtered the oil from the chaff and nuts.
After going through the stress of pounding and filtering the oil from the nuts, the oil is put into the pot and allowed to boil for a few minutes, the remaining ingredients are now free to enter the boiling pot but the steamed chicken feet goes in first, followed by the fresh pepper, octopus, seasoning cubes and salt and I left it to boil for a while.
I put in the Banga seasonings, Bitter leaf, Esam, prawns and snails (because they get soft fast).
At this point, the soup was looking too watery because the Banga did not have enough oil (I think 🤔) so I added a small onion (onion makes Banga Soup thick) and I let it boil for a while, tasted it to make sure it's properly seasoned and voila, a magic potion was created to cure both hunger and craving 😌.
Thank you so much for cooking with me ☺️, I hope you give this recipe a try when you can 😁.
❤️&🕯️ from
The octopus was properly processed and my family except my dad loves it so it's entirely optional.