Weekly Cooking Contest
Aloos steemians,
If you don't eat right, you can live right, take that from me a chronic foodie, lol.
Yes, I love food. I can even stamp that on my forehead and wouldn't mind.
So, for this contest, I will be promoting my most appetizing soup. Atama Soup! I love this particular soup so much and can eat it any time any day. Especially if you let it harbor some flavour of bitterness, ohh myy.
What do one need to make a palatable atama soup.
Items from the market.
Before we go on, I want to let us all know that there are two kinds of atama soups; the one with water leaf and the one with palm fruit sauce (abak). Though, at times, some persons use both palm fruit sauce and the waterleaf, most people don't.
The one I love with all my heart is the one with the palm fruit sauce exclusive.
So, it's the palm fruit sauce atama soup that I will be talking about.
The ingredients are; atama leaves, palm fruits, uyayak spice ( (Aridan Fruit, Tetrapleura tetraptera, optional), meat ( goat meat for me), fish, crayfish, periwinkle, pepper, onions, seasoning and salt.
The qualities of these items are solely dependent on how much you want the soup to be and also how thick you want.
My washed and prepared meat, palm fruit and periwinle.
Pound crayfish. I used a mortar and pestle as I didn't have a mechanical grater available.
I used normal fish, though those bigger ones would have been perfect. ( Economic factors affected this)
For the procedure for cooking is this, you can start from anywhere comfortable for you. Though, this is how I start mine.
First, I dice the leaves into required size. Some persons go ahead to wash out the chlorophyll to avoid it being bitter, but since I cherish the bitterness I don't wash mine.
I had to dice my leaves to the required size. With a sharp knife, this can be fun and also danger sha as you can loose a finger or two, lol.
I then washed the palm fruits, boil it and process it to get out the juice.
The palm fruit juice being ready, I wash the periwinkle, remove bones from the fish and prepare it, pound or grate the crayfish a wash the meet.
My ready to use abak ( palm fruit juice).
I then boil the meat to required texture adding onions, pepper and seasoning to spice it up and make up the stock for the soup.
Now everything being set, I go ahead to start cooking. To the stock, I add the palm fruit juice. After proper heating I add fish, add periwinkle, add crayfish and others things like seasoning, salt, pepper and water ( if need be), in no particular order.
The key point is to add the leaves much later after the whole pot has boiled properly. Note that we didn't add any oil. You should have guessed why by now; the palm fruit juice contains sufficient oil
This is my soup getting underway. I began adding ingredient to be boiling palm fruit juice.
Thus, when you notice that the syrop has begin to thicken enough, you can put in the leaves.
Now, it was time to throw in my diced atama leaves to bring the green to my soup.
Allow it to boil for a while then bring the pot down. If you are wondering the reason for this delay, it is so the fresh succulent leaves do not get overheated and lose some of the nutrients.
How does it look? For me, I would say inviting.
Trust me on this, i devoured it with all my strength. Imagine that the fufu was also well prepared. I am sorry guys, you missed.
So there you have it my splendid atama soup.