Food - Ground Nut

Groundnut and leaf

Get 5 tablespoons of ground nut, one of soda and a pinch of salt, one tomato, half an onion and leaves from a Chinese lettuce, spinach or best of all, rape. Put one glass of water in the pan and boil it. Add the salt and soda and then the leaves of whichever kind they had down the road at the market. Add tomato, coarsely chopped with onion and then the groundnuts. Dampen fire down and simmer, stirring whenever you think about it but think about it a lot until you feel there's something just right with the consistency.

Serve with nshima.

It has a beautiful verdant green and earthy taste, like the look of the countryside around the village when the sun glistens on the maize plants growing and in the puddles on the dark red earth in the rainy season, and smells, when hungry, in a sort of heavenly rather than bucolic way. A English spring-like dish perhaps or one from the last days of a wet English summer, I don't know and it doesn't really matter. It went well with a sausage. It feels like you are eating something mildly salty, tasting of nuts, that looks good for you in a stewed eternal life-giving sort of way. The mixture prepared carefully is thick and creamy, think cauliflower cheese sauce done right, and stringy in a good way, in that subconsciously, that's how you need it so that it sticks to your ball of nshima perfectly, just the way you end up liking it, if you do.

Versatile, there are enough subtle variations in this reliably delicious dish to give a chance, at good odds, of testing anyone's idea of perfection being met without it feeling like a test. It's a small but happy surprise when the taste attains these heights and that can't be a bad thing. Cleaning from your plate the last smears of the sauce becomes a small memory at the end of a meal, with your last ball of nshima and departing pangs of hunger; like half a roast potato with a crumb of stuffing and your gravy tipped up to form a pool in your plate waiting, during the final throes of a Sunday dinner main course, as the little men who you can sometimes hear if you listen hard enough, operate the doors to the stomach issuing the order to heave them too. It leaves you in a state free to wonder what to do next. Something else like that anyway. The dynamics are fun and the flavour is in no discernible way impaired by a plastic bowl or being heated up in a microwave. It is a fine and welcome food, but not suitable for those with a nut allergy.

Ground nut is relatively cheap and you can get it from loads of Chainda market stalls or shops along the road.