African peanut stew, rich & nutritious
I have probably already told you a millions of times, how much I love anything with peanuts in it. So no wonder I always end up making recipes with peanut butter, or peanut sauce. Like this delicious and nutritious African peanut stew. Comfort food at its best!
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
🥘 Main ingredients
- sweet potatoes
- onion
- spinach leaves
- lentils
- vegetable stock
- rice
- peanut butter
- olive oil, or other vegetable oil
- turmeric
- fresh ginger
- garlic
- ground cumin
- ground coriander
- chilli paste
- chives, or coriander
This recipe came to life using the left overs from my sweet potato dahl dish. I always use my leftovers, and I always try to make them slightly different by adding some different ingredients, and sometimes it just works magic, and it deserves a place on its own. This is exactly what happened with this peanut stew, which definitely deserves a separate mentioning.
So there we go, we have all the goodness from the sweet potato, and the lentils. But this time topped up with the richness of peanuts.
📖 Variations
This dish can be completely adjusted to your own liking. In this recipe I kept it minimalist just so to stay closer to the West African feel of the dish. But having said that, Brown lentils are not African, I should have used black eyed peas instead, but those are hard to find in my area.
For me peanuts and sweet potato is a mix made in heaven. And they are both ingredients often used in some of the West African cuisine.
But if you just want a delicious meal, without any constrains, try to add some of these ingredients;
- green peas, or green beans
- tomato or tomato paste
- carrot
- regular potato
- courgette
- the lentils can be replaced by kidney beans, chickpeas, or black eyed peas.
- Corn
🥗 How to serve this peanut stew?
This West African stew can be enjoyed with just chapati’s or rustic bread, use it as a topping or serve on the side. Great lunch on its own. Or add some rice to the stew to make it a large meal. This way it can be enjoyed as a main dinner meal.
Served with rice 
Served on top of a chapati
If you haven’t tried making your own chapati’s yet, check out my ‘love for bread‘ page. There you will find a very easy, quick and delicious chapati recipe.
🥂 Wine pairing…
This dish is sweet, creamy (because of the peanut) and very lightly spiced. So I would try to pair it with an aromatic white.
Think of an Alsatian pinot gris (not the dry Italian pinot gris), or a gewurztraminer. But what might work very nicely as well is an off-dry vouvrey, either still or sparkling.
If you really want to take your pairing a step further, why not try an oloroso sherry. 😉
I hope you will enjoy this peanut stew as much as I do. Please add @haricoco1 to your instagram post. Or comment down below…
📋 Recipe
Ingredients
- 2 sweet potatoes peeled and diced
- 1 onion chopped
- 85 g 3/8 cup spinach leaves
- 400 g lentils 1 cup, can or pre-boiled dried
- 500 ml (2 cups) vegetable stock
- 200 grams (1 cup) cup rice
- 3 tbsp peanut butter
- 2 tbsp olive oil or other vegetable oil
- 1 tsp fresh turmeric finely chopped
- 1 tbsp fresh ginger finely chopped
- 1 tbsp garlic finely chopped
- 1 tsp ground cumin
- 1 tsp ground coriander
- 1 tsp chilli paste
- handful of chives, or coriander chopped
- salt
- pepper
Instructions
- Heat the olive oil in a pan, and saute the onion with a pinch of salt for 3 – 4 minutes
- Add the ginger, garlic and turmeric, and stir for another 2 minutes.
- Stir in the spices (cumin, coriander and chilli paste).
- After 1 minute add the sweet potato and stir well, so the sweet potato is well covered with all the spices.
- Add the vegetable stock, bring to the boil, and let it simmer (covered) for approx. 15 / 20 minutes until the sweet potato is cooked.
- Meanwhile boil the rice according package and keep aside.
- Add the lentils and the 2 tbsp of peanut butter to the sweet potato stew, stir and simmer for another 5 minutes.
- Stir in the spinach leaves.
- And season to taste with salt, pepper.
- Top with some chopped chives, or coriander
- Serve with rice, and chapati's
