Spicery Kitchen Blog

Refugee Action

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Written by Alice
Published on 30th January 2015 at 08:05 • No comments yet, be the first!
Fortunately for us at Spicery HQ the well known phrase 'Too many cooks spoils the broth' proved to be completely unfounded when, for a couple of weeks in Feb we had a different guest each day from the charity Refugee Action coming and cooking their most beloved food from their home country. The countries covered were Cameroon, Kurdistan, Iran, Jamaica, Gambia, Sudan and Uganda and the dishes ranged from the fairly familiar sounding pilaf to the less familiar ndole. The cooks themselves ranged from family cooks to professional hotel chefs all of them filling the kitchen with wonderful smells, techniques unfamiliar to us and food tales from their home country.   Surprising things we learnt from the experience: 1. Despite not sounding like the most appealing list of ingredients, peanuts, kale, chicken, prawns and stock all cooked together tastes GREAT! 2. What we would think of as 'burning' onions e.g cooking them until black makes the delicious base for a lamb pilaf 3. Similarly, cooking spices until they are very dark in colour (rather than for the few seconds we usually do) makes them taste pretty fantastic 4. Adding tea to a lamb pilaf adds colour and a background flavour of tea that is very tasty 5. Green bananas are not really a substitute for plantain 6. Adding hibiscus (or sorrel as it's known in Jamaica) to savoury sauces to go with meat give them a delicious fruity tang (in the same way that cranberries or redcurrants do)   Buy the box here...

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