Viva Lewes Issue #138 March 2018

RECIPE
Groundnut stew
By The Feature Kitchen’s Jacob Fodio Todd
I grew up in Mozambique, then Swaziland, then
Tanzania; my family moved around quite a bit
until I was 13, when we came to Lewes. I went to
school here, to Priory. When I left Lewes the first
time, I went to Paris for two years and worked in
the Rose Bakery there. Then I moved to London,
where I started a food enterprise with some friends
called The Groundnut, a project looking at African
food. We did a lot of pop-up restaurants and we
published a cookbook.
When I moved back to Lewes, I really noticed
that there wasn’t much diversity of takeaway
food available. There are a lot of takeaways, but
they tend to be the traditional Indian, Chinese,
Thai places. It’s really hard for new independent
businesses to open in Lewes because property
prices are very high, which is a shame because
we can’t have more speculative businesses, or
opportunities for people to try out their idea and
see how it works.
The idea of The Feature Kitchen is to create a
platform for chefs and food enthusiasts to come
in and cook. They don’t have to worry about
anything except the food; the packaging is taken
care of, the marketing, the logistics. We work on
a menu together, talk about it, cook it, taste it,
and once that works well they just pitch up in the
kitchen and start cooking. I often kitchen assist,
but otherwise it’s up to them. We work from the
Community Kitchen, so I hire that for a day,
pay the chefs a fee and get some drivers to come
and distribute the food. We don’t have our own
permanent space, so the business is kind of fluid.
The menu changes each month. The first was
Ethiopian, the second was Caribbean, then
Trinidad and Tobago, Thai… all over the world.
And the experience of the chefs really varies.
Genet, who did the first month, used to cook back
in Ethiopia so she's very experienced, just not so
much in the UK market. Omolola is a doctor and
she was taking a sabbatical, so she wanted to take
some time to explore her passion for African and
Caribbean food.
This recipe is actually from a friend, who’s from
Sierra Leone. It’s a peanut-based dish which is
common across West Africa, with similar variations
throughout Africa. Serves four.
Ingredients: 2 tins of black-eyed beans, 2
onions (finely chopped), 2 cloves of garlic (finely
chopped), fresh chilli (finely chopped), 2 heaped
tablespoons of tomato purée, 2 tomatoes (finely
chopped), vegetable stock, 2 heaped tablespoons of
peanut butter, ½ teaspoon of white pepper, salt and
pepper to taste
Method: Heat a little oil in a pot. Add the onions,
one of the cloves of garlic and the chilli (I used a
quarter of a Scotch Bonnet, but adjust according
to taste). Cook that all down until the onions turn
golden brown. Add the white pepper and tomato
purée and cook until it starts to burn slightly.
Put the fresh tomatoes and the rest of the garlic
into the pot with the black eyed beans and add
stock to just cover. Stir in the peanut butter and
leave to simmer for 30 minutes. Season with salt
and pepper. This goes really well with rice, bread –
any staple really – and then a nice salad.
As told to Rebecca Cunningham
This month Chloe Edwards from Seven Sisters
Spices will be taking over the kitchen. Her menu
will be available (Fridays and Saturdays only) on the
weekends of the 9th, 16th and 23rd of March. See
thefeaturekitchen.co.uk
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