Cooking with Juliet - Garden Egg Stew

 If I mention Garden Egg Stew to any of my Ghanaian friends, all express appreciation and pleasure. So of course, I wanted to know how to make this dish.

I don't get the impression that Juliet writes very much and I doubt she has a recipe book, so I looked up a few recipes online here and here  or even here in case you wanted to try it yourself. This one is simple and more like what Juliet made but with different fish (she used one of my favorites - smoked salmon).

Here's Juliet!

Watching Juliet for a time I realize that she basically starts out the same way. She prepares - as in wash, cut, peel, or whatever her vegetables and washes and seasons her protein, then sets it all to cook.

Garden Egg Stew

First she pours in oil and then adds the blended onion, tomatoes and peppers to cook. Sets her chicken that has been washed and seasoned with ginger, salt, and garlic on to boil, while she prepares the next set of ingredients. She always adds the dried fish to boil then puts it in the pot, and she always washes the smoked salmon, takes off the skin, tail and major bones then sets that in the pot to cook, then adds all the vegetables.

There is always a dipping ingredient, today it was yam. I have seen them with street vendors and thought they were logs to put on a fire. Nope they are a source of food like a huge potato. They call them yams, but they a big and white inside. They are hard until cooked just like a potato. I have heard they fry them like chips too. I haven't seen any on streets - not to say they aren't there. Juliet cuts up the yams into large chunks and after boiling they are soft, but hard enough to pick up and dip up the stew with. It is nice because the stew is very spicy and the yam is very mild almost bland and makes a nice contrast.

Purple onions, hot peppers, tomatoes blended and put into oil to simmer

Garden Eggs - washed with stem cut off then boiled

They are easy to peel but VERY hot. Juliet took the seeds and blended them smooth

They may look like logs but they are yams and cook up like a potato
In the background are the smoked salmon, little hot peppers, ginger minced in a little package, purple onions, maggi cubes, garlic minced in a little package and tomatoes. All ingredients going into the stew.

Yams - Peeled, cut up in chunks then boiled and used to scoop up spicy stew - yummy

Garden Egg stew

Portion of stew with smoked salmon and garden eggs scooped up with yam chunks

Cabbage Stew

I asked Juliet if the chicken was going into the Garden Egg stew and she said no. The chicken was just for the cabbage stew that I'd asked her to make again because the last one burnt so bad we had to throw away the pan. I had all the ingredients chopped up and ready and just needed chicken to add. Juliet started out with oil that she put blended onions, peppers, tomato paste and water to simmer, then added maggi cube and spices along with the vegetables of cabbage, green peppers, more onion pieces, carrots, etc. She boiled the chicken with spices, then fried it in sunflower oil then dropped it in the cabbage stew - it was delicious!! We ate it with rice.

Successful and delicious Cabbage Stew