Semolina Fufu and Nigerian Chicken Soup

Do you have a bucket list? I mean are there some things you still want to do before you kick the bucket? Eh, we don't want to talk about kicking the bucket, rather about kicking the ball, but then again not even that.
Whatsoever, I don't really have a list of things I still have to do, but there are certain things I wanted to do and when it comes to this blog, today I can say I have written about one of the things I already had thought  of for a long time. Sometimes, you just need some extra motivation. Thank you to everyone for having such a great share in the Bloggers Around the World World Cup challenge this month. It's a great motivation to go for it and try out things from different countries.
Once again, I don't bring you Currywurst today, but rather take you down to Africa, to Nigeria to be more precise. What I still wanted to write down on this blog, was something about Fufu. What's that? Come and see ... and while we are already at it and we need some kind of soup to go with it I bring you my version of an Nigerian Chicken Soup with it ...

I will tell you what you need for it and how to make the soup. In order to find out, how to make the fufu itself, I guess it is best to refer you to an external video, although in my opinion it's not too hard to make the fufu itself.

Ingredients:
Knob of butter or ghee (I used ghee)
1 onion, chopped up in stripes
2 cloves of garlic, chopped
1-3 red chillies (depending on how hot you like it)
2 chicken thighs
400 g tinned tomatoes
600 ml chicken stock
Salt and pepper

For the fufu you need water and semolina

Method:
Heat up your butter in a pan. Then add your onion, garlic and chillies and lightly fry them off. Add your chicken thighs and let them taste some heat, too. If you are cooking for more people, you could use in fact a bigger pan and throw in a whole chicken or one you have cut into smaller pieces, but with bones and skin still on it.
Anyway, I said, I have two chicken thighs and I am tired of waiting for too long. Therefore I pour in the tinned tomatoes and the chicken stock quite early and season already a bit with salt and pepper. You can adjust it later on further, if need be.

Now let things really going while you bring the soup to the boil. You can put on the lid in between. According to the way you like it, you can reduce the soup later on by removing the lid.
In the meantime you could do your semolina fufu. Either watch the above mentioned video or bring a litre of water to the boil. Then reduce the heat and add your semolina to the water, stirring all the time. Keep on stirring while the semolina thickens. You have to get it to a consistence, so that you could take a bit of the fufu and roll it to a ball in your hand and it stays like that. However, after you remove the fufu from the heat and let it slightly cool down, things will still work in your favour a bit.
All that stirring for the fufu is again a bit of kitchen exercise or I simply need to train my stirring muscles a bit more. Call it kitchen workout. It helps you to burn some of the calories you are about to take in or the previous one, of course count as well.
When everything is ready you can serve it. As far as I know it ... as I had this meal before together with some people from Africa ... you can place the fufu and the soup in the middle of your table and everyone will eat with their hands from those pans. Or was it just the fufu in one bowl and the soup on individual plates. I can't remember exactly.

Like it or not, but somehow like this is how you eat it. Now you start to wonder, how am I going to eat a soup with my hands. So, get a piece of fufu in your hand. Roll it into a ball or not and dip it into the soup.
Now I wonder myself how to adage to eat a soup with my fingers. Either you figure it out by yourselves or you just add a spoon to the image. Get a bit of fufu on your spoon and eat it together with your soup.
Now I reckon I got this dish absolutely right for it was exactly as I remembered it from my memories. Even the taste of the soup itself. However, I prefer the chicken thigh version and not the one with the whole chicken. It could be a little awkward with all this bones in the soup. Right, even with the thighs you have bones, but with a whole chicken roughly cut into small pieces, who knows what to find. The individual chicken thighs can be better controlled and you can have one each and remove it in its entirety from your serving of the soup and eat it as you would eat it otherwise.
Ah, that was another trip down memory lane for me and for you it was the presentation of a typical Nigerian dish, which you might want too try or not.
Anyway, as Nigeria is going to play in the World Cup later today ... for some it might even be tomorrow ... you know what to expect ...

No, I don't necessarily mean that Nigeria is going to win the match against Bosnia ... I'm not really predicting the outcome of the matches with my cooking, but if Nigeria is going to win, I start to get scared myself ...