--- See Minjiba Entertains Sundays 5.30pm from 27 February on SBS Food. Episodes will be available at after they air. ---
“I’m slightly obsessed!” Minjiba Cookey says with a laugh.
She’s talking about plantain (aka dodo, among many other names), an ingredient that came up early on in our chat with the host of Minjiba Entertains. It’s a key ingredient in the very first recipe she cooks in the show, it’s in and recipes on her , and it’s a re-occurring theme on her Instagram account: . Cooked . .
And did you know there’s a ? It’s June 5th, but after scrolling through Cookey’s Insta posts for this versatile fruit, it’s clear any day is a good day for plantain. So when we got the chance to have a Zoom chat with the globe-trotting Lagos-born chef, currently living in London, we had to ask about her passion for plantain.
“I just think it’s the perfect food. it's sweet, and it's savoury. It's filling… it's also versatile in that you can do so many different things to it. You can have it on its own as a main meal or it can be an accompaniment to something else. So, I just feel like it's the perfect sort of canvas to play with from a food perspective. I guess that's why I love it so much.”
As a member of the banana family, plantains are usually eaten cooked. Starchier and lower in sugar, they lend themselves to savoury dishes – such as the Cookey makes for lunch for a newlywed couple in Minjiba Entertains. The show follows Cookey as she cooks for a series of parties and gatherings, from seafood barbecue at a beach resort, to a meat-filled meal for a group of men camping in a Kenyan national park.
At the time of filming, Cookey was running a catering business, as well as developing recipes for her blog, although more recently she’s been focussed on a different kind of cooking: her family. She had her second daughter nine months ago, and took a break from social media over the past year. But she’s looking forward to getting back to it soon, she says, and is also working on another exciting business. When she was living in Nigeria, she opened the country’s first 100 per cent gluten-free bakery, in Lagos. That closed when the family moved to London, but now she’s making plans to open something similar there. “There will be a little bit of Nigerian influence,” she says. “It’s a nice way to present some new ideas to the world.”
Making dodo stacks in Minjiba Entertains Source: Minjiba Entertains
Dodo, kale and prawn stacks Source: Minjiba Cookey
Cookey is sensitive to gluten, and that’s influenced some of her cooking over the years, as have her travels. She lived in Nigeria and Ghana as a child, and in Canada, the UK and Mauritius as an adult.
“It gives you such an amazing introduction to ingredients that you've never met before. And you know, if you're curious about food, and you're curious about flavours and things like that, it just kind of opens up a new world to you where you come across these ingredients, and you're really excited to try them. I think it also sort of recontextualises ingredients that you've come across before and shows you different ways of sort of preparing them, enjoying them, eating them, preserving them and that adds to your, I don't know, sort of subconscious bank of things to play around with food.”
It's clear that Cookey gets genuine joy from sharing good food and flavour with others.
"It's a little spark of joy to give people," says Cookey of cooking and sharing food. Source: Minjiba Entertains
“I find such fulfilment when my food is finally served and I see people relax and engage with the sensory experience of it all,” she says in one episode of Minjiba Entertains, after serving up a mostly-traditional African menu for a party at one of Nairobi’s most famous homes to launch some new music by an upcoming musician.
It’s always a rewarding moment, she explains when we talk.
“There's just something - there's a look that people get on their face when you give them something really sort of surprising to eat or something really sublime and the experience of it. And the way that tastes impact people and smells kind of transport people. It's really, really nice to see that happening when you serve the food.
“And I try and do that even in little moments at home, you know? There's ways to build an amazing sandwich which you take one bite off and you're transported somewhere else.
“It's like a little spark of joy to give to people. And that's really fun for me.”
Cookey’s food in Minjiba Entertains is stylish fusion food, drawing influences from multiple African countries, and sometimes further afield too. For a screening of a film about Lamu Island at the home of an award-winning Nairobi filmmaker, she creates a Swahili menu to reflect the rich culinary traditions of the World Heritage-protected island and city off the coast of Kenya, with a menu including , and – a rich date dessert. For the music launch party, the dishes include and .
Given Cookey has lived in both Nigeria and Ghana, we thought it the perfect chance to ask about the difference between Ghanian and Nigerian jollof rice.
African oxtail stew and jollof rice Source: Minjiba Entertains
There’s a lot of debate about which jollof is better, but Cookey says she couldn’t choose – they’re both good, just different.
“So, the main differences between the two are a number of things. In the first instance, the type of rice that's used. So in Nigerian jollof it is predominantly parboiled long grain rice and in Ghanian jollof, it's basmati rice used as standard. Also, it's the same fundamental ingredients, so onions, tomatoes, peppers, etcetera. But there's a slight difference in the way they're combined in the beginning stages. And then, the Ghanaian version has spices in it that the Nigerian version doesn't tend to use.”
Cookey’s interest in food and flavour started early on.
“It's something that's just always been there. I remember just being really more sort of taken than most people by certain tastes or certain combinations. And, in fact, even now, there are sort of, there are tastes from, you know, the ‘80s and ‘90s, which I'm still trying to recreative. I'm like, ‘I remember that exact taste. How do I get that.’
“My mom used to cook a lot. She's quite a creative person. So that also impacted the way that she cooked. My grandmas, both grandmas, used to cook and they had such different cooking styles, but each one of them had really sort of interesting things and slightly different ways of doing things. So even at home, I had a lot of exposure to lots of different things … I've just always been curious and I think I was lucky to grow up in an environment where creativity was encouraged. So, I was allowed to explore. I knew that for some other people there was like ‘what are you doing? Why are you wasting ingredients?’ whereas I was allowed to have failed experiments and I think that really kind of set me on this path and allowed me to explore and, you know, get good at it.”
The enthusiasm for experimenting remains unabated. This is good, because we really want her recipe for kelewele, a delicious dish she mentions when talking about the names for plantain, and ways to eat it.
“Dodo is one of the names in Nigeria that it's called. The plantain itself is called ogede, but nobody really calls it, that everyone just says plantain or dodo. And then even with that, with dodo, you've got different subsets. So, for example, you've got party dodo, which if you say party dodo, everyone knows that you mean the little cubes… and then everyone has how they prefer it. You've got sliced diagonal, and then you've got sliced down the middle and then diagonal, which in Ghana is [used in] a very specific thing called kelewele, which is absolutely delicious. It’s plantain seasoned with ginger and spices and fried."
“I’m working on a recipe. I've made so many times but it's one of those things I kind of make by feel because I remember it from being a child and it would always be in the market… Sometimes when you do something instinctively it's actually hard to capture and communicate that so people can replicate the same. But I am working on it. I'm nearly there!
In the meantime, she suggests those who wanted to expand their plantain cooking could try her . “This is one of my favourites and it’s always a hit.”
She also hopes that watching Minjiba Entertains will give people more ideas for food to share.
“Now that things are easing – I don’t know what it’s like in Australia, it's up and down here, but we can kind of have small gatherings, you can see your closest friends and family … And I hope that people will try some of these recipes when they're hosting their nearest and dearest, and I hope that people have a wonderful time discovering these new methods and ingredients.”
She's discovered something new too: she says she's intrigued by she spotted on the SBS Food website. "I've never heard about that before, and I've put that in my grocery basket for this week's shop! That's very exciting".
Missed the start of the show? Catch up at SBS On Demand.
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