To the East my brother, to the East. Shakshuka.

Never did  I say it.  Not one time.  Not even once did I ever say that the only place in the world where one can find authentic soul food is in America.  My dear children, I have not said that, will not say it and firmly don't believe such a statement to be true.  Cause it ain't.  Yes, I did say "ain't."

Now, what I have tried to communicate is that I believe the proposition that there are two major categories of food that qualify as "Soul Food" these being  Orthodox and Unorthodox.  Often I will refer to them as "Soul Food Proper" and "General Soul Food."  These two differ in that one is composed of traditional dishes that came about as a result of disenfranchised people taking what was given to them because their social standing denied them access to certain foods, and elevating the ingredients they did receive into something now widely and even globally recognized as quality fare.  This is my description of Orthodox or Soul Food Proper.

However, I also believe that there is an entire category of foods in every culture that qualify generally as Soul Foods in that culture RATHER than the foods that would be considered "Fine Dining" foods.  These are the ones often made from cheaper ingredients or have strong familial and traditional history.  They are sometimes comfort foods or even street foods that vendors have been selling for generations to the working and poor people of their homeland.  

There is also a legitimate argument that Soul Food is whatever food that one puts their own heart and soul into when making it.  I know that my dear daughter, Nicole understands this.  She's the first to inform people that don't quite get why we love to fellowship, cook and eat together that among  our family's love languages is food, cooking and fellowship.  My baby gets it because she's lived it.  Some foods and food experiences touch our soul because of where they take us and who they connect us to.  That is why I think Shakshuka is definitely a Soul Food.

Shakshuka starts with fresh ingredients.  I use Roma tomatoes, jalapeno for heat, onions and mushrooms to add a meaty bite.

Ask any of the millions of people that eat Shakshuka if they consider it a Soul Food and after they are done smiling (or even while they are smiling) at the thought of this North African and Middle Eastern staple, they will tell you that it most certainly is.  Spicy.  Sweet.  Warm.  Comforting. Home.  These are but a few of the terms I've heard when describing Shakshuka, and now I see why it's becoming so popular here in the West.  But it's not just the hipsters that are loving this dish.

Because Shashuka is essentially eggs poached in a spicy tomato sauce, in many places it's generally associated with breakfast.  However because of its versatility of potential ingredients it's always found its way to lunch, brunch and dinner tables.  Shakshuka is typically spiced heavily with cumin and garlic.  I decided to forego the Harisa and instead go with a variety of peppers to get my heat on.  Some versions of this dish include potatoes, artichokes and even meats like sausage.  I think I'm gonna get more creative the next time I do a Shakshuka, cause meat is ALWAYS on the menu for a brotha!  Sorry Vegans.  Not sorry.

Add all of the fresh, chopped ingredients to a cast iron pan along with cumin, salt, black pepper, paprika sauteing them together before adding the tomatoes and cook down to a nice thick but still moist consistency.  Make sure to taste!

Although good canned tomatoes can be used in place of fresh, I honestly never considered not using fresh tomatoes since I could actually find some that looked quite good.  Of course whole canned tomatoes cook down much faster, so there's that if you're in a hurry and using them is not quite sacrilegious.

Scoop out pockets in the sauce to add the eggs.  Do NOT break them or you've blown it!  Then, reduce the heat and let simmer covered until your eggs are just done.  Remember the eggs are gonna keep cooking so be ready to serve just before they reach your desired doneness.  Add salt, pepper and cilantro and you're in there.

My best advice is to go fresh with this dish, at least the first time.  And oh yeah...get a nice baguette and toast up some slices to eat with this baby!  Here's one of my favorite recipes.

 

Stretch your cooking wings and give this one a try.  It's worth it!

Kev

Bow Down. The Soul Food King has arrived.

Pan Fried Chicken   The Undisputed King of Soul Food.

Worthiness. Easily one of the finest qualities and even character attributes or accomplishments we can ever assign to anything.  Worthiness is a pinnacle.  It is an ultimate validation. 

What gives a person or a thing this particular quality?  What are "Worthy Making Properties?" My guess is that, it depends.  It depends on what we are considering worthiness...of.  To truly unpack and discuss worthiness we must (in my humble opinion) consider any thing, person or entity's worthiness as it corresponds to the antecedent of the proposition  "Because he, she, it, they are............"  followed by "therefore he, she, it or they are worthy of..........?  Here's an example or two.

Because God is absolutely, morally and ontologically perfect in his boundless love, justice and character, therefore he is worthy to be worshiped and served by all of the things he has created.

Here's another one. 

Because The Sweet Ohio State Buckeye Football team is an incredible, winning and championship program far surpassing the U of Xichigan, therefore they are worthy of fandom.

Don't fight it UM fans, it's science.

Worthiness is a quality or state of being that comes as a result of meeting some standard that is usually quite lofty.

I therefore propose to you, my dear readers, that Pan Fried Chicken has done just that, and so is worthy to be considered The King Of All Soul Foods.  Long may he reign.

Good fried chicken starts with fresh chicken, seasoned and dry brined for at least 30 mins and  dredged in seasoned flour. Of note, I do not use seasoned salt on my chicken, instead opting for a down south tradition of regular table salt.  But I do use seasoned salt in the flour.   Along with my other savory blend I add a good smoked paprika and a good chili powder on the chicken being careful to add them one at a time and hand mix the salt and each of the spices onto the washed chicken.

*Seasoning TIP... Always salt first and separately from the other seasonings.  On my chicken I rub the salt in by hand, working it through the wings.  When salting this way you can and should use more than the normal amount of salt without fear of over salting.

And It's Not Even Close

For the last few years I've been asking a lot of questions.  Seems to me that doing so is a great way to get information, so I'm the guy in the room that raises his hand.  I had to stop doing it at the end of Bible Study because I got the feeling that the people that were ready to go home didn't appreciate me and my questions adding another half hour to the class.  One of the questions that I've really enjoyed asking people of all walks of life is a rather simple one.  It occurred to me that in cooking there are a number of ingredients that come in three's and are considered to be the "Trinity" for that particular kind of  or region of cooking.  

To be clear, this is not an analogy to the question of a religious Trinity...but I'd be happy to have that discussion with you offline. This is, however an attempt to identify foods within what people commonly and without leading consider to be the three most necessary, irreplaceable and sacrosanct foods in all of soul food.  So, I asked grandmothers (of as many ethnicities that I could find) I asked teenagers, friends, co-workers, millennials, chefs, cooks, writers, artists, filmmakers, church folk and atheists one question.  "What are the three foods in the Soul Food Trinity?"

Many of the answers I got were for some reason, predictable.  But, others were downright bizarre.  My co-worker Helena, a dyed in the wool millennial actually included pizza in her soul food Trinity.  Pizza.  Of course others cited more standard fare like Collard Greens.  Fried Okra.  Catfish. Baked yams. Gumbo. Chitterlings (chittlins). Fried Cabbage. Rice. Gravy. Potato salad.  Someone even picked Koolaid, which I would have called a bit racist had that person not been Black.

The answer I got far and away more than any other food item and usually the first one out of their mouth was Fried Chicken.  This perception alone of its popularity and sense of necessity to be included in any soul food discussion makes it worthy not only to be in the Soul Food Trinity, but to be its head, seeing that most people believe that the quintessential soul food meal must include fried chicken.  You may bow now.

Let the dregded wings sit a few minutes before frying them in a pan of hot oil of your choice.  I chose wings because cooking time is much shorter than most if not all of the other pieces.

The history of fried chicken as we now eat it, battered or coated with a crunchy crust that comes by being fried or deep fried in oil, seems to have its origins in Europe (Scotland)  and West Africa.  Both have their own tradition of frying the bird in oil, but the Scottish version had no spices (is anyone shocked by that?) or coating whereas the African version was heavily spiced.  These two came together like so much American soul food  did in the atrocity of the slave south where slaves cooked for their masters and added spices to the fried and coated chicken.  A delicacy at the time, few slaves actually got to sample their own wares.  But, that didn't keep the popularity of the dish from exploding world wide.

Some version of fried chicken can be found in cultures and destinations all over the world.  Many of whom are influenced by the version we love. This is yet another example of the humble beginnings of food greatly influenced by the traditions of disenfranchised persons still rising in spite of and in an unquenchable fashion as described by the late poet supreme,  Dr. Maya Angelou.

I'm not gonna lie to you, as I write this I'm well aware of the ugly stereotypes that for decades have pervaded the American perception of  some mystical connection between black people and fried chicken and other beloved southern and soul foods.  I'm "woke" as my beautiful daughter, Ty might say.  Heck, I've been "woke" for darn near 40 years now and one thing has not changed.  I love me some fried chicken.  Say what you want, me and that yard bird got special affections for one and other, and I anticipate that this is a "till death do us part" kind of situation.  Is it my all time favorite food?  No, it's certainly not that.  But when it comes to soul food, it's irreplaceable.

So, this is my first fried chicken post.  As much as I love fried chicken you can rest assured, it won't be my last.

Kev

Foodways, Black Panther and Chicken Yassa

Chicken Yasa

Sabbatical is often a necessary thing.  It allows us to recharge and reconnect with that which is truly important.  It is an opportunity to set aside the maddening and to reach for the sublime.  Sometimes, you have to seek peace of mind first, and that I've found is in the author of all peace.  With that done, I'm back.  And I'm back with a big one.

While I took the time away I became a better student of food, the culinary arts and practices and soulfood in particular.  I'd like to think that I even became a better writer and cook, as well. My dear friend James Gilmore doubts my skills, but he's young and hardheaded so he kinda gets a pass.  Shout out to The November Company for doing such a fantastic job on the pilot for an upcoming project, by the way.  Anyway, it was during my sabbatical that I found myself growing, my love for God deepening and my internal soulish sense of self...reaching.  I hadn't yet realized it, but this entire blogging venture has been an exercise in me doing just that.  Reaching for something.  It wasn't until I began working on my next theologically inspired book and then went and saw the movie Black Panther, that I started to put the pieces together.

Sidebar.  If you're one of the 4 people in North America that hasn't gone to see The Black Panther movie,  you simply don't know what you're missing.  Especially if you're black.

Me and the peeps at Black Panther

Baby Dora Milaje.  Representation matters

To be transparent, I've been aware of the reaching of my soul pointed upward toward God and inward in the inspection and apprehending of the gifts and talents he's placed in me for some time, but this was different.  For the first time in many years, I felt quite clearly  my soul...reaching backward.  Not back as into the old life that I had prior to the transformation, not back into symbolic Egypt, so to speak.  But, back into a time and place and way of living and of a people.

One of the most important tropes that the Black Panther movie explored and illuminated into images was and is that of an untouched and undisturbed people of The Continent.  It is a kind of fantastical, counter historical, hypothetical proposition of what people who look like me and my family might have lived like had our ancestors not been brought as chattel slaves to this country.  I think that it is a worthy proposition to explore, one that might hold answers to how we reach and finally achieve another, more sustainable and viable brand of unity, today.  

As my mind reached back to the land of my ancestors (or at least some of them..more on that in another post).  I realized that had the circumstances that created of what we now know as "soulfood proper" might not have ever given rise to it at all.  In fact, the foods that the slaves were denied by virtue of their position in society might well have been the very foods these same ancestors dined on without prohibition.  Under those circumstances it is possible that without colonization, immigration or a strong trade between the continents like in the fictional Wakanda, that African foodways might never have been established here in the "new world."  But I'd still be eating Chicken Yassa.

Dinner In Wakanda

Webster defines "Foodways" as  "the eating habits and culinary practices of a people, region, or historical period" and this I think is a quality definition.  However, folklorist Jay Anderson's description of Foodways is even better.  In an essay from 1971 he wrote that  "foodways encompasses the whole interrelated system of food conceptualization and evaluation, procurement, preservation, preparation, consumption and nutrition shared by all the members of a particular society."  Thank you Wiki.

Imminent food scholar and historian Dr. Jessica B. Harris is partly to blame for this post because when I went reaching back to The Continent to find a food item to use as a goal post that I would attain to that represented a very accessible dish, it was Dr. Harris that provided me inspiration.  In an interview about her excellent book, "High on the Hog" she was asked "What African dish that you've eaten is your favorite?"  Without hesitation Dr. Harris replied, "Chicken Yassa."  And the chase for me, was on.

To say that Chicken Yassa is a popular dish is a big understatement.  This African version of lemon chicken, or perhaps we might say "the original version" of lemon chicken is in my opinion better by light years.  Yes, I am also a nerd.  A West African dish mostly associated with Senegal, Yassa is heavy on the onions and crushed garlic in the marinade of mustard (I used organic brown mustard and I loved it) along with hot pepper flakes, bay leaves, salt, vegetable oil, black pepper and of course, fresh lemon juice, the marinated chicken and onions sits overnight (for the best flavor) and then goes into a pan to be browned.

The final steps in this incredible dish are to remove the browned chicken and place the entire marinated onion garlic mixture into the pan to be sauted until the onions are caramelized.  This part cannot be rushed and the smells your kitchen will experience are simply...sublime.

Finally, the chicken pieces are added back into the abundance of sauted onions along with some chicken stock to finish cooking and the dish is done.  Chicken Yassa is always served with a starch and that is usually rice.  The beautiful part of this is that any protein can be cooked in a Yassa fashion. and the variations using fish are quite common.  Below is the recipie that I adapted for my dish.  I decided to omit the olives but will likely give them a try next time.

Try this dish.  It's worth your time to learn it.  Maybe while you're doing so and chopping more onions than you could have ever imagined any single dish would require, maybe you find yourself reaching back or up or within to find something that touches, moves or inspires you. 

I did.

Kev