CLICK HERE FOR THE RECIPE I USED Djerma stew is a chicken stew and is the national dish of Niger. It is comprised of chicken (of course), tomatoes, onions, carrots, garlic, ginger, peanut butter, and assorted herbs and spices. Yes, peanut butter. It is used to thicken and add flavor to the sauce near the end of cooking. I used unsweetened peanut butter because the sweetness in regular peanut butter would be unwelcome (for me, anyway) in this stew. This wasn't difficult to make, it just required a little effort getting the vegetables prepped and some time for it to cook. It was recommended to serve it over rice and I did and it was GOOD. It wasn't spicy, it wasn't bland, it was packed with flavor and the chicken was very tender. I really enjoyed it and will happily eat the leftovers. Will I make it again? I enjoyed it so much, I think I will! Just a smaller portion next time because I have a lot of leftovers. The first time I make a recipe I follow it as is to give it the best shot to taste like it is supposed to taste. If I make things again, knowing what they're supposed to taste like, I scale it down so I don't end up with a ton of leftovers.

CLICK HERE FOR THE RECIPE I USED Sometimes, when I'm Googling recipes and foods for a country, one recipe from that country will keep showing up over and over in my search. That was the case with Salpicón. It sounded pretty good so it made my search a quick and easy one. The main ingredients are round steak, onions, garlic, and green peppers. If you have a food processor, this is pretty easy. Boil the steak with the veggies and then chop things up in the food processor and season with lime juice, salt, and pepper. Then serve with rice and beans or whatever works for you. (I served it with rice and beans.) This was good but I felt like it needed something. It could have used a bit more salt and pepper, which is easy enough to fix. By itself with rice it is a bit dry so I squirted it with additional lime juice and sprinkled fresh cilantro on top and that helped but it still felt like something was missing. I will probably tweak the leftovers a bit. I think if I reheat it with a little oil and throw in some cumin and roasted garlic it it will probably make a pretty good taco filling. All in all, this wasn't bad, it just didn't do much for me and I probably won't make it, as is, again.

CLICK HERE FOR THE RECIPE I USED It was hard to find a recipe that was unique to New Zealand. Mainly because it has a very similar cuisine to Australia. This Māori recipe kept coming up in my searches and wasn't meat pies (which I made for Australia) or fish and chips so I went with it. I used pork shoulder, smoked pork neck, potatoes, sweet potatoes, cabbage and spinach for my version. These were all ingredients listed either on the linked page or in other versions. I used what I could get locally. You just throw things in a pot, at different stages, and boil them I was worried this was going to be bland because there's not a lot of seasoning or spices involved but it had a really nice flavor! I think using the smoked pork neck really helped it find that flavor. It is essentially a pork and vegetable soup with dumplings (doughboys). The doughboys soaked up a lot of the broth and were very very filling. I didn't love them but they were fine. All in all, it was a good meal. It didn't punch me in the face with flavors like a curry might but simple hearty flavors are pretty great too! Will I make this again? I don't know. I enjoyed it but I'm the only one who would eat it. It's a lot of food for one person and I don't think it would freeze well. I will gladly eat the leftovers!

(Vegetable Soup with Meatballs) CLICK HERE FOR THE RECIPE I USED I found a few things on the linked site that I was interested in but it was chilly and snowy today which meant it was a good day for soup! This soup has easy to acquire ingredients, is not difficult to make, and you can put whatever vegetables you want in it. I had onions, celery, and carrots on hand so I chopped those up. I also had premade chicken stock in cartons on hand so I used them for the broth. The meatballs weren't difficult to make, you make them like you make other meatballs, just smaller. The linked recipe doesn't mention it but other recipes (I think everyone's grandma has their own take on it) for this soup throw some vermicelli in toward the end of the cooking time. I didn't have vermicelli but I did have some orzo so I added that and that turned out well. It was very easy to make but it was also bland, as is. I ended up adding salt and pepper to the broth along with some dried parsley from my herb garden. The end result wasn't super exciting but it was simple and filling. Finishing the leftovers will not be a hardship. Would I make it again? Probably not. If I'm going to make a lot of small meatballs, I'm just gonna go ahead and make albondigas soup which I prefer to this one.

CLICK HERE FOR THE RECIPE I USED Nepal had a few recipes I was interested in but this one involved making a rice flour crêpe and I wanted to try doing something different. And I succeeded in mutilating some crêpes! 😄 I managed to get the batter to the right consistency and everything looked great when first poured into the pan but I discovered that my stovetop is too hot, even on the lowest setting, to keep the crêpes from cracking. Once they crack, they are difficult to slide out of the pan in one piece. They're still edible just not as pretty. The crêpe is topped with spiced ground chicken, tomatoes, cilantro, and an egg. All yummy things! The crêpe itself is quite bland so it needs the toppings to make it interesting. All in all, this was good. Not the best thing ever but I enjoyed the meal. Will I make it again? I don't know. Once I've finished the rest of the countries, I might revisit this recipe and try to perfect making a rice flour crêpe. But I'm not sure how to get past my stovetop being too hot and I do not have kitchen space for a crêpe maker.

CLICK HERE FOR THE RECIPE I USED Nauru is the smallest island nation in the world and it doesn't seem to have much of an online presence. At least not as far as recipes and cooking blogs go. It has little to no agriculture and much of their food is imported. They do have fish and coconuts and their national dish is Coconut Fish. I found conflicting information on how that is actually prepared. Some say it is tuna sashimi in coconut milk. Other say it's fish breaded with coconut flakes and fried. I think the fried version is a Western take on it and not the original authentic take. In either case, fish was not happening in the house this time around out of respect for the person I live with, who is sickened by the smell of fish. Which left Spam fried rice. It was mentioned in conjunction with Nauru several times though no one seemed to have a recipe specific to Nauru. Sites just kept sending me to the recipe I've linked to so I decided to roll it. I feel like I must have eaten Spam at some point in my life before now but I can't remember having done so and wasn't sure what to expect. It was actually pretty good! I love fried rice so it already had that going for it. I diced the Spam fairly small and got a nice sear/browning on it and it was tasty! It was a little saltier than I would prefer but it was still good. If I were to make it again, I would use the reduced sodium version of Spam. But I probably won't make it again. When I make fried rice, it is usually to use up some leftover odds and ends with leftover rice and not really a meal I've planned out and shopped for. This was good but it won't become part of my dinner rotation.

CLICK HERE FOR THE RECIPE I USED When it is cold out, I tend to gravitate toward soups and stews and Potjiekos sounded like comfort food with a kick that would warm a person up. It has beef (or beef and lamb, if you prefer), potatoes, carrots, and onions so the basic beef stew ingredients are present. But then you add the spices and that takes it into new stew territory. You need curry powder, Kapana spice blend (I made it using this recipe.) and ground thyme. I had an issue with the thyme that I think made the end result disappointing. The recipes calls for Kapana spice blend which already contains thyme and then an additional 1 Tbsp. of ground thyme. I figured the recipe author knew what they were doing so, against my instincts, I added all the thyme. And the stew had an overwhelming thymy aftertaste that was not pleasant. I guess you could say I had too much thyme on my hands. Anyway, I ended up doctoring it to try to take the thyme flavor down a notch, and found Dave's Gourmet Creamy Garlic Red Pepper sauce to be the solution. Underneath all that thyme, there is a tasty stew, it just needed less thyme. The Kapana spice blend probably would have been enough on its own. There are roughly one thousand different recipes for potjiekos online so a different one might yield a different and less thyme-y stew. Will I make it again? I don't know. I liked the curry addition to the beef stew so I might do that, in the future, but I would not use this exact recipe again.

CLICK HERE FOR THE RECIPE I USED This one was a challenge because of the Myanmar/Burma name change. I will not get into the political back story and any related controversy, I'm just here for the food. With that said, I had better luck when searching for recipes from Burma than I did Myanmar. Maybe I was just not using the right selection of keywords in my searching? The description of it as a curry made me look into what makes a dish a curry because this isn't chock full of "traditional" curry spices. And, if you start googling what makes a curry a curry, you will get, at least, 156 different answers, with many different levels of gate-keeping. One site did say the foundation of curries begins with onions, garlic, and ginger and using that information, this is a curry. A lot of the flavor comes from onions, garlic, and ginger. This one took some effort. The grocery store didn't have pork legs and the pork shoulders were much much larger than what I needed. So, I picked up a couple of bone-in pork shoulder steaks and then deboned them and chopped them into cubes. Trying to get all of the meat off the bone was probably the most difficult part of the recipe prep. With smooshing the ginger in a mortar and pestle being the second most difficult. Though the smooshing was kind of therapeutic. There are a few steps to cooking the pork. Boil it to make broth. Brown it in oil for flavor. Then braise it in the broth with onions, garlic, ginger and the remainder of the seasonings, until the pork has reached the desired level of tenderness. The final product is a brothy oniony pork that I ate over jasmine rice. The site says it is a dish traditionally fed to "weaning children" and the pork is typically cooked until it is fall apart tender so it is easier for little ones to chew. I cooked mine to when all of the fat had rendered and just before it reached the fall apart phase. (my preference.) And it was very good! Just a flavorful and filling dish that I really enjoyed. The jasmine rice was good and starchy and held up to and absorbed the broth really well! Will I make it again? I don't know - it's a lot of effort for one person but I really enjoyed it. I would eat it again, that's for sure.

CLICK HERE FOR THE RECIPE I USED I'm going to confess, right off the bat, that I used store bought Peri Peri sauce for this recipe. Mostly because I was amazed that our local grocery store carried it at all and I don't have a lot of energy these days. (Recovering from the flu while trying to catch up on things that didn't get done while I was very sick and trying to get everything ready for the holidays!) I made everything else! The recipe describes it as a mildly spicy chicken dish and that is what it is. I'm sure one could add more peppers to the marinade or more Peri Peri sauce if one wanted it spicier. There's a healthy amount of garlic in the marinade which makes it a winner in my book. This chicken is intended to be grilled but, after chasing the squirrel's picnic table across the yard when the wind tried to blow it away, I decided it was too cold and windy for grilling and baked it in the oven. It turned out flavorful, slightly spicy and juicy in the oven but I think the grill would have added another level of flavor that would have been even better. And would perhaps have crisped the skin up a little bit. It's garlicky peppery and yummy! I ate it with a tomato-y Spanish type rice and corn and it was a great meal. I will happily eat the leftovers. I really enjoyed it and it is definitely something I would like to make again, only on the grill next time.

(chicken with preserved lemons and olives) CLICK HERE FOR THE RECIPE I USED Morocco had many many options to chose from and I am sure I will be trying other Moroccan foods in the future! I chose this particular recipe because I've been on an olive kick lately and I was curious about the preserved lemons. There are recipes to make your own preserved lemons online but I do not have access to Beldi lemons and I wanted to know what they tasted like. So, I ordered some from Amazon. This wasn't especially difficult to make but it did take some time, effort, and attention. It ended up taking less time than the recipe states because I used chicken thighs instead of a whole chicken or chicken quarters (we only see chicken quarters at our store every once in awhile). I knew the thighs would cook more quickly than larger chicken pieces so I sautéed the onions, by themselves, longer than stated in the recipe. And adapted the time of everything else to work with the cook time for the thighs. And it was delicious! The preserved lemons add a tang that is less intense than fresh lemons but still delicious. The Kalamata olives add a punch of flavor that, when combined with the saffron, is fantastic. This is packed with flavors! I ate the chicken Mkalli with couscous and wilted spinach. A bite of the chicken with the sauce and a little couscous? Divine! I will happily eat the leftovers but will I make it again? If I could get the preserved lemons locally, I definitely would.

CLICK HERE FOR THE RECIPE I USED Montenegro, despite being tiny, had a few options I was interested in but I went with cevapi because it matched my current energy level. Cevapi are a sort of elongated meatball. They are said to be a common street food in Montenegro and they are not at all difficult to make. Throw things in a bowl, mix, make into little sausage-shaped thingies, put in fridge for a bit, and then cook on the grill or stovetop or in the oven. I ate them in a pita with onion and Avjar sauce (made from roasted eggplant and red peppers - I bought a jar on Amazon.) along with french fries. They were good and very filling! I do think they could have been spiced a little more. The recipe calls for a tablespoon of paprika but I think, if I'd made a blend of smoked, hot, and regular paprika it would have had more oomph. You could really season them any way you like and serve them with any sauce you like and they'd make decent meal. I was satisfied with the meal but I don't know if I would make it again. Though I probably will because the smallest jar of Avjar I could get on Amazon was much more than I actually needed and I need to figure out how to use it all up.

CLICK HERE FOR THE RECIPE I USED I learned a few things while researching this one. The Mongolian Beef you get from your favorite Chinese restaurant did not originate in Mongolia. It appears to have been developed in Taiwan. Mongolian BBQ? That didn't originate in Mongolia either and it also seems to have started as a thing in Taiwan. Mongolian cuisine involves a lot of meat and ingredients that are easy for a nomad to carry or acquire. Fruits and easily perishable vegetables are not very common ingredients. In more cosmopolitan areas, you'll find more variety but that is not representative of the rest of the country. Anyway, it's Fall and that is a good time for soup so I opted to make this simple soup. It requires 200g meat, 150 grams of whatever vegetable you have, salt, pepper, and water. And fried noodles, which you can make yourself or just use premade wonton strips. I used beef, a large onion and 2 small carrots (chopped up into little tiny cubes) and the premade wonton strips. I know they're not carrying around premade wonton strips in Mongolia but I really didn't want to fry anything. When I fry things, I end up feeling greasy and gross and I make a mess. I didn't feel like dealing with all of that so I took a shortcut. And I'd do it again. The soup was super easy to make. The recipe says that, other than salt and pepper, you can use other spices "at will" so I added a little onion powder and a little garlic powder. It is pretty much a blank slate that you can season all kinds of ways but I tried to keep it simple and as close to the original recipe as possible. I did let it simmer longer than the recipe instructed because I got distracted for a bit. I don't think that did anything other than give the flavors more time to develop. The recipe sounds bland but it ended up being pretty flavorful! It's just a simple and satisfying soup. It won't punch you in the face with flavor but it is definitely not flavorless. I really really liked it and it will become a Fall staple in my meal rotation. It's easy to make and the ingredients are easy to find and it is very customizable. I truly enjoyed this one!