African Chicken-Peanut Soup
Hearty Soup Stretches Leftover Bird into another Simple & Tasty Meal
In twenty minutes you can make another meal out of leftover roast chicken or turkey and ingredients you probably have on hand.
Soups are warming comfort food in the cold months. Most are also easy on the wallet since they are great stretchers of meats and other expensive ingredients, in this case leftover chicken or turkey. The secret ingredient that makes this easy recipe intriguing is peanut butter.
This recipe is adapted from West Africa. In Senegal they make a version called “Mafe” that stretches a little chicken even further with the addition of cabbage and several root vegetables.
African Chicken-Peanut Soup
- 2 Tbsp dark sesame oil
- 1 medium onion, chopped
- 2-3 cloves garlic, minced (1 1/2 tsp or more if vampires are a problem in your neighborhood))
- 1 cup cooked chicken, diced
- 1 1/2 tsp curry powder
- 1/2 tsp each of salt, freshly ground black pepper and red pepper flakes (the kind you get with pizza)
- 2 cups chicken broth
- 1/4 cup tomato paste
- 16 oz can chopped tomatoes
- 3 Tbsp chunky peanut butter
Directions:
- In a large pot over medium heat, sweat the onion in the sesame oil until translucent, about 6 minutes. Add the garlic and chicken and sauté one more minute
- Stir in the curry powder, salt, pepper and red pepper flakes until the chicken is evenly coated.
- Add the broth, tomato paste, tomatoes and peanut butter. Stir until well combined. Increase the flame to bring the soup to a very hot but not boiling temperature. Serve immediately, garnished, if you like, with a sprinkling of chopped peanuts.
Variations:
Aside from baking, which is more like chemistry, most recipes should be treated as outlines. You can vary relative amounts and ingredients to your taste and what’s on hand.
I hope you will feel free to make this recipe your own by adding virtually any vegetables you have in the drawer of your refrigerator. If you do, sauté them along with the onion and then after the liquids are added, let the soup simmer long enough for the vegetables to cook through.
The Africa Connection
You may have thought peanuts (and Cracker Jacks at the “old ball game”) are all-American food. Consider the possibility of our kid’s lunches without PBJ sandwiches. And the pilgrims missed that treat.
Peanuts did not come to the American colonies until the West African slave trade. Researchers have learned, though, peanuts were not originally native to Africa either, but rather South America. The conventional wisdom is that peanuts migrated to Africa with early explorers.
George Washington Carver, born a slave, eventually earned a degree from the Tuskegee Institute where he famously developed hundreds of uses for peanuts. Prized for that flexibility along with their high protein content and ease of cultivation, today India and China are the two largest growers of peanuts.
If you like Thai and Indonesian dishes, you know peanuts are as important to those cuisines as they are to a Red Sox baseball game.
For more food our of Africa, try Cabrales-Stuffed Medjool Dates.
For more unique soup ideas, try:
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