December 31 | Senegal

It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly six months since our last Around the World in Quarantine! With rising COVID-19, we decided it might be a good idea to resume our home based travels for New Year’s Eve.

When I don’t have a specific country in mind, I revisit our previous dinners and the continents represented. I realized the number of African dinners was low, and thought this would be a great opportunity to continue exploring African cuisine. While researching countries in Africa, I came across Senegal, and it was exactly what I was looking for.

Color Scheme: Brown and White

Tablescape

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Menu

First Course: Avocat aux crevettes and Thiou de boulettes de poissons

Dinner began with two appetizers, avocat aux crevettes and thiou de boulettes de poissons. Avocat aux crevettes is like an avocado and shrimp salad. It’s base is chickpeas topped with an avocado and yogurt mixture, tomatoes, onions, and shrimp. If you like avocados, this is for you! In all honestly, I was a little apprehensive at first, but all of the flavors melded together very nicely.

The second appetizer, thiou de boulettes de poissons, was essentially fried fish balls. As you all know, I always try to limit frying food in oil, so I used my handy Ninja airfryer for this recipe. The thiou de boulettes de poissons are served on top of a tomato and green pepper sauce. Though the sauce was good, I wish the sauce was “saucier”. Nonetheless, the sauce and the thiou de boulettes de poissons paired very well together.

Second Course: Thieboudienne

For our main dish, we enjoyed thieboudienne, the national dish of Senegal. And let me apologize in advance because my picture does absolutely no justice for this dish. What really stands out to me is how complete of a dish this is. The thieboudienne is comprised a flavorful fish, rice, vegetables, and a sauce that is absolutely delectable. For this recipe, I use grouper for the fish, and green peppers, cabbage, sweet potatoes, carrots and eggplant for the vegetables. The best part about this dish is that everything is cooked in the sauce amplifying the flavor of EVERYTHING. When cooking this dish, it reminded me a making couscous for our Moroccan dinner. It was a lengthy process but worth every bit of the time and effort.

Third Course: Mamadou’s Banana Glacé

For dessert, we enjoyed Mamadou’s Banana Glacé. I chose this dish because Donnell loves bananas, and I knew he would enjoy it even though he isn’t big on eating sweets (other than chocolate chip cookies). The banana glacé was almost like a banana split. The cream on top of the bananas was a mixture of partially frozen heavy cream, sugar and mashed bananas. It was the perfect amount of sweetness. The cream was then topped with slivered almonds, chopped peanuts, raisins and dried cherries. This dessert was just right to end our heavy dinner!

Beverage: Bissap

To accompany dinner, we enjoyed Bissap, a juice made from dried hibiscus flowers. Bissap also happens to be Senegal’s national drink, and I can understand why. It is absolutely delicious and almost reminded me of floral tea. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of it, but you can see it in the top tables cape photo at the top of the blog.

Final Reflection:

Senegal was delicious. Donnell said it was one of his favorites thus far. I would put it in my top 7.

After six months, it was fun to put this dinner together. It may be time bring Around the World in Quarantine back on a regular basis. What do you think?