Mataha - East African Soup

[greeneyedsadie]

So tonight I made Mataha, which is an East African dish. It's a dumpling in the bottom of the bowl with a vegetable soup on top. It's from this vegetarian bean cookbook I have, Bean Banquets. The dumplings have these big speckled Christmas Beans that I get at the farmers market, potatoes, spinach and hominy. The soup has onions, garlic, curry, cauliflower, cabbage, spinach, tomatoes and fresh peas.

Because everything I buy at the farmers market comes fresh from the farm, I had to shell all the peas and de-stem all the spinach and I had to chop all the ingredients and cook the four dumpling ingredients separately, and the beans took forever to cook (I should have soaked them longer). Oh well. This soup is DELICIOUS. It took me a total of 4 and a half hours to cook though, and there was a ton of chopping, cooking, mashing, you name it. But it was worth it It is really good.



Here are the ingredients for the dumplings, all cooked and ready to go but the beans were not cooked yet.




Here are all the veggies waiting for the soup:




Here's the dumpling mixture after mashing:




Here's the soup cooking:




Here's the bowl with the dumpling:




And with the soup on top:




We got two meals out of the recipe so our dinner cost about $8 for the three of us, so it was a little pricey, but we're eating cheaper the rest of the week. I'm trying to see if it's more expensive to eat as much organic as possible (meat is sort the only really expensive organic item nowadays). I'm also trying to eat as little processed food as possible. Really it's just time it takes. But as a vegetarian meal it's really filling and feels like a meal.

Also, it took forever to make because I used dried beans. If I had used a can of kidney beans instead, the entire meal would have taken about an hour.

Here's the recipe (click twice for full size):