Courtesy of http://www.avartsycooking.com

Last week my friend Chinwe decided she was going to make moin-moin and posted it on Facebook. This sparked a renewed longing to grind my kitchen and produce something of an American version, given the fact that I buy the local beans I find here. I haven’t worked at it yet, but this may well be the week I knock on my apron and get my wife laughing at my American moin-moin début. My Ijebu garri has been languishing and waiting for an appropriate companion for a while now 🙂

But this points me back to some thoughts of what made eating moin-moin exciting for me. As a child, my mum’s creation wrapped in nkong (what Efiks call the leaf used in wrapping the bean paste) was deservedly top-class. From the way she creatively separated the skin from the bean seeds using a mortar and pestle (although I soon became the point man for that part of the labour), to the blending with pepper and ground dried crayfish plus other ingredients to match, to the skilful apportioning of the paste into the leaves and finally to neatly wrapping the leaves, without a single drop of the paste leaking out, before placing into the pot. There was something near divine about the whole process and I usually observed it with strict attention.
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