South African Bobotie

Dinner tonight was bobotie, basically the national dish of South Africa if Wikipedia is to be believed, which combines spiced meat, dried fruit, and nuts under an egg crust. It's a bread pudding variant that highlights South Africa's cosmopolitan population. Here are the instructions:

1. Read recipe from the Co-op circular to make sure you have all the ingredients. Go shopping. Come home and realize you now have two heads of lettuce and no meat. Send Dear Husband to the Co-op for 1 lb ground turkey.

2. Heat oven to 305 degrees F. Grease an 8x8 pan with a butter paper leftover from DH making the crust for a plum pie.

3. Whisk two eggs in a bowl. Add 1 cup milk. Tear two slices whole-wheat bread into bowl and set aside to soak.

4. Chop onion. Cry. Use a trick you learned from your father: hold a piece of bread in your mouth to block the aromatic compounds from finding your lacrimal ducts.

5. Saute onion in olive oil while you chop 1/4 almonds and 1/4 cup dried apricots. Measure 1/4 cup raisins and not quite 1 tablespoon Madras curry powder.

6. Realize you should have used a larger pan. Because you assume this is like the other bread pudding recipes you've made, have DH empty the onion into the bread-egg-milk bowl to make space for him to brown the meat.

7. Leave for your 1-hour massage while DH finishes cooking the chopped ingredients and 1-2 tablespoons of lemon juice on the stovetop (with salt and pepper to taste); assembles the meat pie according to the recipe with turkey mixture on the bottom and bread-onion crust on top; sets it aside to bake said plum pie; and then puts the bobotie in to bake for 45 minutes.

8. Let bobotie cool while you make a green salad. Eat immediately!

DH thought I could have put in the whole tablespoon of curry. I was not too impressed with the crust, and not just because that's where allll the onion ended up--maybe it needed more bread? It looks like this dish makes six servings, so we will have leftovers for this week.


Editor's regret: I wish that I had ever finished blogging about my 10 days in South Africa in 2013, so I could compare this to the street food I sampled there. Nevertheless, you can find the posts I did make by searching for the keyword "South Africa." The titles all begin "SA."