Around the Horn of Africa

Somalia

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Busy day today but I managed to get down to Central Avenue to Jamile’s Cuisine International or Jamile’s Cuisine & Grocery Store depending on the sign you choose to believe.  Either way it was the designated representative for Somalian cuisine.  This is a place you’d never find if you weren’t looking for it.  It’s in an older plaza that looks like it might have started life as offices but since to other things like Jamile’s which takes up two suites, one for the restaurant and one for the store but they share a common entrance.  You turn between one obvious Mexican restaurant and another that doesn’t have a name that I could see and Jamile’s is on the left.

I was among the first diners of the day and the lady who was my server came over from the connected store.  There is nothing fancy about Jamile’s, it’s kind of dim and decked out with a number of 4 seat tables covered with blue and white checked plastic table cloths but it was clean.  The menu is very limited with 6 main dishes plus a choice of 5 sides and a couple of other meal options.  You don’t have to worry about getting hung up making decisions.  When she gave me the menu the lady mentioned they were out of 2 of the 6 main dishes and 2 of the 5 sides further facilitating decision making.  She asked if I’d been there before or was familiar with the food and since I hadn’t been and wasn’t she explained a bit about the choices.  I opted for the goat meat with rice.  As an aside I’ve had more goat since I started this blog than I have in my 50 plus years prior, I kid you not.

With the meal there is an optional free soup that I opted to receive.  As you can see in the photo below it is served in a stemmed heavy glass bowl that looks like it would be right at home with a frozen fruit drink in it.  This soup however was the opposite of frozen, oh my was that stuff hot.  Initially it was just heat hot and when it cooled enough to taste I discovered it brought a little spice to the party as well.  It was a pretty much just a meaty broth with an occasional bit of herb spotted but it did have enough salt and spices to add too but not overwhelm the broth’s meaty flavor.

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The main course came out just as I was finishing the soup.  It was a healthy portion of rice with a good amount of meat and a token salad, my favorite kind.  The rice was good by itself and had some herbs mixed in to make it pleasant tasting and there were a small number of raisins scattered at the edges that added a hint of sweetness.  The goat was very tender and seasoned well but it was also bony.  Not a bad thing necessarily but some of those bones could have been used to shank someone.  It did have a good taste though.  Now if you will direct you gaze to the center of the plate in the picture you will see a small little container of an innocuous looking green sauce.  Another aside, I found this place just this morning when I was checking the hours of the place I originally intended to go and I checked them out on Yelp to make sure they didn’t specialize in ptomaine and one of the reviewers gave one of my new favorite descriptions on Yelp ever.  This sauce was described as “hotter than the devil’s daughter”.  Being prepared I didn’t just start lapping in up and dipped a small goat chunk in to get a feel for the heat.  My conclusion is that while it was no joke in the spicy department I think the devil’s daughter is likely hotter.

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Once I got that salad out of the way and settled in to a rice, goat, sauce rhythm the meal was quite enjoyable.  As with a lot of the places I’ve been to since starting this blog the patrons were mostly from the same area as the food represented by the restaurant.  Verdict for Jamile’s is that it was an enjoyable meal that felt authentically Somali.  I couldn’t find a web site or Facebook page for them so just Google them to find more info.  As always stop by the Tell Me More page for some additional content on Somalia.

 

Back to Africa

 

Nigeria

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From the Orient I headed back west to Africa and specifically Nigeria for the restaurant this week.  I actually started out for a Liberian restaurant that turned out to be closed but thanks to the power of my smartphone, Google & Google maps I made my way to Motherland Cuisine & Market which kept it in the west African region.  I have to say I was not disappointed in the reroute.

You have to be looking for this place as the little strip it is in runs perpendicular to the The Plaza road so you won’t just stumble on it.  It is an interesting little place.  When you walk in the primary seating is at two U shaped blue counters with matching blue fixed swiveling stools that seat about 7-8 each.  There are a couple of booths against the outer wall and a couple of high tops against another wall.  I didn’t see any sign of a market but that may have been in another part of the building.

There were only two other people there eating besides me and one of them greeted me as I came in.  Nice to have the other customers welcome you.  I grabbed a seat at one of the counters and young girl came over and apparently it surprised her when I said yes I wanted a menu and would be eating lunch there.  I guess they don’t get that many guys wearing a cool green Power Ranger t-shirt with kanji all over it there.  The menu isn’t very large but they have fish, chicken, goat and vegetarian options so most people should be able to find something.  I opted for a meat pie appetizer because I was planning to try the potato greens which didn’t have meat but they were out and I opted for the goat with jollof rice and moin-moin as my side.

 

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The meat pie was ground beef with some spices in a pastry crust.  It was good, nothing exceptional and a bit cool in the center so they could have left it in the oven a bit longer.  I had no idea exactly what jollof rice was and my options for sides included fried plantains, mixed vegetable or moin-moin.  I asked the girl what moin-moin was and she said it was like a cake but not sweet so I went with it since I know what the other two were like.  The goat was braised then stewed in a moderately spicy tomato sauce.  It was generally tender and boneless and the braised outer edges added something.  I did get a chewy hunk of what had to be goat skin and it had a good flavor but I didn’t want to devote the time it would have taken me to chew it sufficiently to digest.  The jollof rice was quite good and spicy as well.  It has tomatos and spices in it as well so if you are heat sensitive opt for the steamed rice.

For me the moin-moin was the most intriguing of the dishes.  It looked like some steam lump of cake that looks orange in the picture but was closer to pink.  The taste was familiar but I couldn’t nail down what it was aside from more pepper.  Turns out it is made from pureed black eyed peas, with red bell pepper, habanero pepper and corned beef and then the whole thing is sealed in a pack of some sort and steamed.  It was soft and moist and went well with the other two dishes.  The portions were generous enough I couldn’t eat it all.

Aside from the teenage girl who waited on me there was an older lady who I assume was doing the cooking and a teenage boy a couple of years older than the girl who came over mid-meal and told me he hoped I was really enjoying the food.  As I was paying the lady at the register she asked, with African accented English, how I liked it, thanked me for coming in and made sure I had a to go menu to take with me.  While this was going on you could hear the kids in the kitchen going back and forth about something.  The lady gave them that motherly whisper-yell thing to quiet them.  “Brother and sister?” I asked.  Head shake, sigh, nod.  So it’s a family joint with authenticity going for it.  The  streak of wins continues as far as I’m concerned.

Check out the Tell Me More link for more on the Jollof rice, did I mention it calls for ground crayfish?