[Lively music] [Speaker 1] Hi everyone and welcome to passport kitchen. I'm so excited to see you guys off on your travel excursions through this fun kit program. Before you get started with whatever kit that you have in front of you though, you need to do the following. First and foremost, if you have long hair like mine, you're going to want to pull it back. That's a kitchen safety rule. Secondly, you're going to want to wash your hands. Always make sure your hands are washed. And lastly, you're going to want to make sure that your work surfaces are completely clean and sanitized. So make sure those things are done before you start working on your recipe this week. And finally, before I forget, you're going to want to have a trusted adult in your household helping you, just in case you need a little extra help in the kitchen, especially when it comes to cutting vegetables or sauteing on the stove top, or using the oven. So I'm going to hand over to today's lesson. You guys have a wonderful trip and I can't wait to see you next week. Bye! [Speaker 2] We're really excited to have you here. This week we're going to be traveling to the great country of South Africa. Our friend Kathy who works- used to work for MSU Extension, has a home in South Africa, also, where one of her children lives with her grandkids. And so we're really excited that she's able to share that with us. And we're able to travel to South Africa through our kitchens. We hope that you enjoy this and we hope that you will be able to learn a little bit about South Africa and maybe travel there some day. (Pause). [Kathy] Hello there. I'm Kathy, and I'm happy to welcome you to my South African Kitchen. Helping me out today is... [Allison] Hi, I'm Allison and I'm part of the Michigan 4H club. [Kathy] And we are going to make Bunny Chow today. [Allison] Bunny Chow? What's bunny chow? [Kathy] Well, it's a typical South African dish, especially in the part of South Africa known as Durban, which is on the Indian Ocean. Now what sort of meat do you suppose goes in bunny chow? [Allison] Bunny? [Kathy] Good guess, but no, actually it's chicken. Bunny chow, in this case, is the combination of four large onions finely chopped, and a clove of garlic. And we already have that going here in 4 tablespoons of vegetable oil. And while that cooks, because we want that to get nice and brown, we'll talk about some of the other ingredients that go into it. Today we're making our bunny chow with chicken, potatoes, onion, garlic, and some green peppers. And we'll talk about these green peppers in a minute. Some tomato paste, some tomato sauce, and a whole bunch of spices. So while these onions brown, let's talk about what bunny chow is, and why there's no bunny in bunny chow. South Africa is a country in Africa that, you won't be surprised, see, this is the map of Africa, my cutting board is a map of Africa and the city of Durban is way down here in South Africa, in the country of South Africa. And in the country of South Africa, the population is about 80% black people, about 10% white people, and another 10% Indian people. And that is a very important 10% in South Africa, especially in terms of bunny chow. You see, the Indian Ocean is the only thing separating India from South Africa. And in about the 1920's, Indian people came to South Africa to work in a sugar cane field. There's a lot of sugarcane in South Africa. And it's hard work. The sugar- sugar cane is very tall and green and it has very hard edges. So working in the sugar cane fields is very hard work. And they brought in people from India to do this work, especially to cut the cane. When the big, tall, 8-10 feet high, stalks were ready to cut, the- that's when the cane cutters went in. And the cane cutters, for the most part, for some reason, were from India. And when the cane cutters went to the field, they took their lunch with them. Just like a lot of people in the United States take their lunch. And they didn't have a lot of dishes, they didn't have a lot of utensils. So they were wanting something that they could easily carry and easily eat without a lot of utensils and that's how the bunny chow got born. And bunny doesn't mean rabbit to them. Actually, in Durban, South Africa where this dish comes from, Baniya was the name of the Indian caste, or class of people, who sold food in the street. They were called the Baniya. And the food that they cooked was called chow. Just like we sometimes call our food chow, right? So this was Baniya Chow. But over time it got kind of shortened down to Bunny Chow. And that's why people say bunny chow? But it doesn't have any bunny in it. Actually our bunny chow today is going to be made with chicken. But it could be made with other kinds of meat. I guess it could even be made with bunny, but to tell you the truth, I've never heard of that. It's probably most commonly made with lamb or mutton. So we're let- we're letting this brown and as soon as this is browned up nicely, we're going to add a whole bunch of spices. This recipe very much depends on the spices. And the first spice we're going to add is green chilis. And these green chilis are found in lots of African food, lots of Indian food, and some other kinds of food too. They're very- they're like very small peppers. But they're not peppers. At least not according to the South African people. And today we're going to use three of those chili peppers chopped up. It doesn't look like very much. But trust me, it's a lot. Want to use your scraper to scrape those in there? [Allison] Sure. [Kathy] Okay. There you go. If you didn't want it quite so hot you could take out some of the seeds. But we didn't use that many in the first place. So we'll just set that aside. We'll stir that in a little bit. Oh yeah, and it's browning nicely. It's getting right to the point to where we add the rest of the spices. But we're going to talk about the spices before we add them. There's a lot of kinds of spice in this and it looks like a lot of spice. The first one is fennel. This one is a seed from a flowering plant, and most people in the US are pretty familiar with fennel. We use it for a lot of things. This one is ground cumin. That's also a seed from a flowering plant. And even people who don't eat Indian food know about that one because it's very often found in Mexican food too. Anybody that loves tacos, whether they know it or not, they probably love cumin. And this one is called garam masala. Weird word, Huh? Actually it's two words, "garam masala". And garam masala is not actually a spice, It's a combination of spices. So there's two words, "garam ", means hot, "masala" means mixture. So this is a hot spice mixture, named "garam masala". Very, very common in Indian cooking. Another one that we're familiar with a little bit is coriander. Coriander is the seed of the plant that we sometimes use in guacamole, in Indian cooking. We put cilantro in it. Well coriander is the seed from the same plant that the cilantro comes from. This is cinnamon. You know, we think of cinnamon in the US as mostly going in sweet things. Yeah. But it's- it's a hot spice too. Cinnamon is sort of unique and- and as far as I know, cinnamon is the only spice that comes from the bark of a tree. So, that's kind of cool. And finally we're using turmeric. This very yellow one is turmeric. And I'm going to dump the then now and let you- let you stir. Turmeric is actually a root. And turmeric is believed to have- by some people, to have medicinal properties. So it's getting more and more popular. It's used for a lot of things, though, it's used as a dye. Sometimes yellow things are dyed with turmeric. If you use real turmeric, the root, you would grate it up and you would dye your fingers, your grater, your utensils, your bowl, your counter, if you're not careful. But it is really yummy and real- really, really popular. So we're just going to brown that up a little bit, make sure the spices get all over the- all over the onions and garlic that we already have in there. And now we're going to add our potato. That's just two potatoes cut in half. If they were bigger ones, we would probably cut them up a little bit more, but we just want to make sure that everybody gets one potato in their portion. And we want to kind of stir them around so the potatoes. are nice and yellow. You want to make sure everything gets covered. [Allison] I want to make it. [Kathy] Okay. Now, we kind of got that together, so we're going to add a small 8 ounce can of tomato sauce. (Pause). You want to stir that a little bit? And a 6 ounce can of tomato paste. (Pause). Now these are pretty common ingredients in South African cooking. But if you ask for tomato sauce in a restaurant, or at a grocery store for that matter, they'll probably just give you a funny look. Because they say to-mah-to sauce. And when they say tomato sauce guess what they're talking about? (Pause). We put it on hot dogs and hamburgers. [Allison] Ketchup? Yeah, ketchup! If you asked for tomato sauce, you'd get ketchup and that's not what we want. So if we were in Durban and we wanted what we call tomato sauce, we would ask for tomato puree. And that would get us what we think of as tomato sauce because we wouldn't want to put ketchup in this. Okay, good. So we're just going to stir that up until it's all sort of- everything is all coated and nicely mixed. And we're going to use- then we're going to finally put in our chicken. And now we're using about a pound and a half of chicken thighs today. (Pause). We could use chicken with bone in and we could use pieces of chicken breast. But today we're going to use about a pound and a half of chicken thighs. You want to know why? Because that's what I had in my freezer. So we're putting about a pound and a half of chicken thighs in here. And we're just going to kind of mix that all up. We want them to get that good spicy color and flavor. [Allison] And for them at home, do we leave the fat on? [Kathy] I didn't cut the fat off there wasn't too much fat on these. But if you were really averse to it or you had a lot of fat, we- we'd cut that off. Now we're going to let that cook just a little bit. (Pause). And our recipe says water as needed. So we're gonna start with about a half a cup of water. (Pause). We want it to be kind of a saucy consistency because that's gonna cook and cook and cook and cook down until the chicken and the potatoes are- are cooked and it's nice and brown. (Pause). And that's going to take about 45 minutes. But since we don't really want to stand here for 45 minutes, we'll set this one aside (pause) and put out the one that we cooked earlier. How does that look? [Allison] Yummy! [Kathy] That look pretty yummy? [Allison] Yes. That's what the finished filling for a Durban bunny looks like. Now they would call this a curry. In Durban they would call this a curry, but you know, we think of curry as being a particular type of seasoning. But in South Africa, curry is just like a soup or a stew. So this is a curry and actually it doesn't have any leaves of the curry tree in it. So they, they would be going " What?" "Why are you calling that curry?" Now, this is the brilliant part. Set these aside. If we were in Durban, we would go get a loaf of bread that wasn't sliced, which is easier to find there than here. But, we can find them. This time, I'm just going to use some of this French bread. See, how I cut off a big slice. We're going to hollow out the in- This is how we're going to serve it. And this was the secret of the cane cutters. When they were taking their food to the- to the field. They put it in the hollowed out bread loaf. (Pause). Take it to the field and then they would dip these extra pieces of bread in it. And that's how they would eat it. We're going to- we're going to give them a little bit more. This makes about four servings. And we want to make sure that every serving gets some chicken and some potato. So here you have it. This is our Durban- our Durban Bunny Chow. What do you think? [Allison] It looks yummy. [Kathy] You're ready to try it? [Allison] Yeah! [Speaker 2] Thanks Kathy for sharing about South Africa. We're really excited to try your bunny stew. So kids, try it, let us know how it is, share it on your Facebook page. And then we'll come back for next week where we're going to learn a little bit more about a different country or culture. Thanks for joining us and we'll see you again next week. (Pause). [Lively music] (Pause).