Join twowildtides on the country challenge. Each week, we’re going to be heading to a new country (in spirit). Primarily, we’ll be cooking a meal from each country; but we’ll also be watching travel documentaries, reading travel blogs, and listening to music. During the global pandemic, travel is largely inaccessible. We want to reignite our wanderlust, satisfy our travel bug as much as we can, and learn some new things along the way. I have a feeling our bucket list will have a number of items added to it through this experience as well. We created a simple alphabetical spreadsheet with all the countries of the world, and each week we will draw a random number that corresponds with a country on the spreadsheet.
This week’s country is Burkina Faso. Currently, the Government of Canada warns against non-essential travel to Burkina Faso due to the threat of terrorism within that country. Heartbreakingly, the once peaceful nation saw a devastating massacre in one of their small villages over the summer and nobody is talking about it. You should read about that here. Stay informed.
While we do not advise travel to this country at this time, I still want to highlight the beauty and culture of this country, as I have with every other so far. So check out this post by LonelyPlanet.
The national dish of Burkina Faso is Riz Gras, which translates to ‘fat rice’ because of the amount of oil used. We followed two recipes. We used the ingredients from this recipe by All African Dishes and followed the cooking directions from this recipe by the Peace Corps. This meal was quick, easy to make, and tasted very good.
I cooked the chicken separately from the rice and just baked it with salt, pepper, and thyme as the seasonings. The rice was simple to prepare and the oil gave the rice a fluffy, almost buttery texture (I tend to make my rice too dry). The flavours from the vegetables and seasonings were subtle yet very enjoyable. I was pleased to learn this new technique for preparing rice– cooking the rice in the sauce instead of topping plain rice with sauce. We would absolutely make Riz Gras again as a simple weeknight meal!
Let us know what you think!