Most pregnant women, especially first-time ones usually find it difficult to eat regular foods during the first eight weeks. They throw up every now and then and some of them find some foods they used to enjoy nauseating. If you fall into this category and would rather eat food with enough pepper, Xquisite Food is recommending obe alata sue sue. Obe alata sue sue is a Yoruba name for a hot and richly peppered and spicy stew that, when eaten, sweat envelopes the whole of your body. Obe alata sue sue will make you suck in air and make noise that sounds like uuuuuussssssss ahhhhhhhh! Hence, the nick name sue sue.
What really makes this stew stand out is the fact that you don’t need too much condiments as it only requires about five different types of pepper such as Red bells (red tatashe), green bells (green tatashe), dried chili pepper (ata Ijosi), scotch bonnet (rodo), tabasco chili (ata wewe) Kashmir chilli (shombo) and little balls of tomatoes and onions (You fry them to an extent that they begin to taste sweet and you need to add lots of onions to get the taste). This sauce can be very hot, so, feel free to vary the pepper count to your heat tolerance level. Rather than meat, it tastes better with dried fish stocks, crayfish and iru (locust beans) and palm oil, rather than vegetable oil.
To make this sue sue spicy stew, this is the direction:
- Wash all the fresh pepper and onion and blend roughly. Then pound the dried ones with mortar and pestle with very little water. Add crayfish, continue to pound for two minutes and set aside.
- Wash the shredded dried smoked and stock fish and also set aside.
- Put a pot on fire, when it’s hot, add palm oil. The oil should not be bleached, add a slice of onion, when the onion turns black, you’ll know it’s hot enough.
- Add the chopped onions, stir till brown, be careful not to burn it, and then add the iru to get the flavour.
- Add the grated pepper, grounded tomatoes, pounded pepper with iru and stiri for ten minutes.
- Then add the shredded smoked fish and stockfish, sprinkle seasoning, and leave to cook or some minutes.
The combinations are endless. You can use it as a sauce for rice, yam, and with swallows that can go with ewedu. With a few tweaks and addition of orishirishi (meat) you can make it into Ofada sauce.