Spicy Tomato Coconut Soup by Celia Wakefield

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Once again, Sunday means our own Celia Wakefield, here with a tale of her brush with royalty, and a delicious, warming soup for a cold February night.

 

Here I am on Valentine’s Day thinking of all the delicious things that can be made from chocolate. My hope is that you haven’t finished your lovely box of chocs yet. As I age I find that stretching out the pleasure becomes a pleasure in itself, so I shall be miserly with my box and enjoy its delights very slowly. 

Having tempted your taste buds, I need to confess I have not made a chocolate recipe this time; but while we are on the subject of chocolate, did you know that Ghana is the world's second-largest cocoa-producing country? (Côte d'Ivoire is the largest).  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was sixteen when the Duke of Edinburgh (married to Queen Elizabeth II) came to visit Ghana and declare open the University of Ghana where my father worked. The University had been open for many years, but had been accredited to the University of London for the degrees bestowed. Now London had accepted their academic standards were comparable to London University and therefore Ghana could grant their own degrees. The buzz in town was HRH’s visit and the Convocation in the new hall atop Lagon Hill. I was very excited, as my father had a ticket for me as well as for my mum. I had a new dress and a hat, of course. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We arrived in the forecourt to see several Chiefs, dressed in kente cloth robes, seated on their ‘stools’ with their courts around them. We found our seats in the hall and waited. Finally the academic procession with HRH arrived with ceremony and after the usual introductions the Duke rose to address us. He cast a careful and deliberate look around the new hall, and said, “Isn’t it a good thing that the world loves chocolate.” 

 

 

Much applause. I have no photos from the event unfortunately. Imagine how his remark would be received today with everyone reporting on Social Media.

Now before I go further, I have a book to give away. Decluttering is one of my goals for 2024, and I have started. Slowly but determined is me. Finding I have two copies of Ruth Reichl’s memoir of her time at Gourmet magazine, Save Me the Plums, it seemed the right thing to offer it to you all. If you missed it, the title alone makes one want to open the book, and the poem in the frontispiece by William Carlos Williams draws one further in. I have loved Ruth Rechl’s writing ever since I picked up Tender at the Bone, and was fascinated by her stories of her mother. Ruth’s tenure as Editor at Gourmet ran the gamut from great successes, through witnessing the collapse of the Twin Towers to the unexpected closure of Gourmet Magazine. It’s a great story. The copy that’s up for grabs is signed by Ruth. I didn’t mention that did I?

But what about the recipe you cry. Where’s my soup? Soup has certainly been our go to as the recent temperature in Maine fluctuates greatly. This is another grab what you have and cook with very few weights and measures. A few weeks ago I found Roma tomatoes in the local supermarket. I know they are wonderful for sauce so I bought a dozen home and thought, now what? I hope you will try my tomato, coconut soup with shrimp, or chicken or whatever takes your fancy.

Ingredients and Directions for my tomato, coconut soup with shrimp:

Preliminary directions:

I cut the tomatoes in half, drizzled them with olive oil fairly liberally and roasted with sliced onions and garlic in a low oven, 325F degrees for about an hour and a half till they were jammy in texture. 

I left the veggies to cool then put them through a food mill. See the photo of the amount of lovely tomato left on the underside of the plate to be scraped off into a measuring bowl.

Ingredients:

1 medium onion chopped in small pieces

 

Seasonings: I know several of you have spoken about my recipes which use curry spices. So does this one, but I see no reason to use other seasoning that is enjoyed by your family. Taco or barbecue seasonings, Old Bay or other mixes. Use and adjust to your preferred taste.

I am using a Patak Tikkka Masala Spice Mixture which contains: turmeric, paprika, canola oil, salt, corn flour, tamarind paste, cumin, fenugreek, cilantro. But for the future and my very low salt eating, I shall make up my own masala mix as I have all the spices in house, but the spice mix 

is convenient which is what the soup is all about.

 

2 Tbsp Masala spice mix

1 Tbsp pink garlic powder

1 Tbsp spanish paprika

 

1 cup tomato mix, see above or use a cup of drained canned pureed chopped tomatoes

2 Tbsp tomato paste

2 Tbsp red miso mixed into 3 Cups of water or salt free stock

1 can unsweetened Coconut cream (I bought sweetened coconut cream in error it tasted really good and Julia loved it. But if one is trying to watch calories unsweetened would be best).

1 can Coconut milk

 

1-2 Cups small frozen shrimp or cooked chicken, tofu, whatever protein you enjoy

2 Tbsp Oil, Canola or Safflower 

Directions:

Heat the oil in your soup pan to medium (I use a Le Creuset dutch oven)

 

Add spices including the garlic powder and saute gently

 

Add onion pieces and cook till translucent

 

With the heat on low add the tomatoes and saute mixing everything well

 

Add the tomato paste and taste to see if more seasoning is needed

 

Add the water and miso paste and cook gently

 

Add the Coconut cream and milk and stir to mix well

 

As it comes to a gentle boil, cook for a couple of minutes

 

Taste for seasonings again

 

Add the shrimp and bring to a gentle boil checking that the shrimp are cooked

Serve to appreciative guests with some bread for mopping up.

ALL THAT GLITTERS: A STUDY IN GOLD:

RHYS BOWEN: One of the benefits of being part of Jungle Red Writers, apart from the incredible

sense of community we've established, is learning about new authors. Kwei Quartey is someone I hadn't read before but when I heard that he grew up reading Enid Blyton, I felt an immediate connection. I absolutely lived the Famous Five and the Secret Seven when I was a child.  A perfect grounding for anyone who wanted to be a crime writer in later life. So I'm delighted to introduce him to you now: 

KWEI QUARTEY: When I was a boy of about ten living in Ghana, West Africa, I entered a writing contest with an essay I called "My Ambitions." The list included becoming a teacher, veterinarian, ventriloquist, artist, pop star, and a writer. The latter stayed with me the longest. My childhood home was full of books, and I continually found new ones to read. The genre that attracted me most was crime fiction. I consumed mysteries by British children's author, Enid Blyton, who isn't very well known in the States but is still published widely in the British Commonwealth. Sometimes I was up to two Blyton novels in a day. Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes was another series in which I immersed myself.

All those books around me at home stimulated me to write, and my black American mother and Ghanaian father—both lecturers at the University of Ghana—encouraged my efforts. I wrote several short stories and three novellas, which I covered with cardboard jackets I illustrated myself. One was called, "Cougar, Hero Of The Jungle." Another was about a group of five kids who went around solving mysteries. I wrote them in longhand (until I learned to type later on) and bound them with jacket covers I illustrated myself. Nowadays, we call that self-publishing.

By the time I was a teenager, I had chosen medicine as my intended profession. When I was nineteen, the death of my father, awful political and economic conditions in Ghana, and my brush with the military government (another story altogether) drove my mother to return to her native New York with my three brothers and me. By then, I was in premed and faced the task of getting into a US medical school. It wasn't easy. Eventually, I succeeded in gaining admission to Howard University College of Medicine, where I got my MD degree.

During medical school and residency training, I did no creative writing at all, but once my boards were out of the way, I rediscovered my love for writing fiction. It was to be a couple of decades before I created Inspector Darko Dawson, the hero of my present murder mystery series. Each novel, including the upcoming April 26 release, GOLD OF OUR FATHERS, is set in Ghana.

I live in the States, but my connections to my birthplace will remain strong, especially since I visit Ghana once or twice a year to conduct research. I pick an outstanding Ghanaian social issue (what country doesn't have them?) and then I work a murder and story into it.

Ghana was called the “Gold Coast” until its independence in 1957. In the fifteenth century, Europeans had known the West African coastal region as the source of the gold that reached North Africa via the trans-Saharan trade roots. Gold had been sold to Europe at least as early as the tenth century. When the Portuguese came to the shores of the Gold Coast in 1471, they called their landing area La Mina, or The Mine, a reference to the gold they discovered. That name became corrupted to the present-day Elmina, a town in the Central Region of Ghana.

The phenomenon of foreigners raiding Ghana's resources hasn't ceased since as far back as the 15th century. To this day, the British still have an ancient gold mask purloined from the Ashanti Region in 1874.

 SOLID GOLD MASK, (8 X 6 INCHES) SEIZED BY THE BRITISH FROM KUMASI, GHANA, IN 1874, NOW IN WALLACE COLLECTION, LONDON

Around 2010, Chinese illegal miners in the tens of thousands began immigrating to that same Ashanti Region in search of gold. A couple of years later, I read an article detailing an exchange of gunfire between Ghanaian police officers and Chinese nationals. Two fatalities resulted, and the story was a diplomatic embarrassment for both Ghana and China. But to me, it spelled murder mystery, igniting my creative energies and setting up my next novel in the Inspector Darko Dawson series.

Before I set off to Ghana to conduct research, I had been aware that digging for gold involved substantial disturbance of farmlands and lush forests, but I had not realized the intensity of destruction the illegal gold miners had inflicted on the landscape. During my expeditions into the remote interior of the Ashanti Region, I was stunned by the vast swathes of land laid waste by excavators and earthmovers.

As I explored, what emerged was a milieu rich with conflict and corruption. Some of the locals battled with the Chinese, who had obliterated cocoa farms and palm groves, but village chiefs—whom the Chinese paid off—welcomed the foreigners. Young Ghanaians, attracted by the quick and easy way to make money from gold, were uninterested in the slow business of farming cocoa, and thus generational resentments arose. Throw in harsh, squalid conditions and jittery mine guards with pump action rifles, and I had a story to tell of the dirty, ugly side of gold.

Of all the human and social conditions I have researched for my detective series, I found this one the most affecting. The environment has always mattered to me wherever I've lived, but what dismayed me about what I found in the Ashanti Region was the enabling role Ghanaians played as the Chinese illegals bulldozed their way across the land. I tried to convey this complicated relationship in GOLD OF OUR FATHERS, and I experienced a torn feeling over a grim reality that was so perfect a setup for a fictional work.   

RHYS: Doesn't this sound absolutely fascinating? I love reading about places and situations I knew nothing about before, how about you?