Garden Egg Sauce

Upgrade your sauce recipe and bring a little sunshine into your cooking with this delicious garden egg sauce recipe, complete with surprising twist for extra depth and African flavours. Juicy succulent sauce made with fresh garden eggs and tomatoes. Could alternatively be prepared with aubergines, in absence of garden eggs. This tasty juicy sauce when paired with freshly cooked rice or boiled yam is a real winner!

Ingredients

• 6 large garden eggs
• 1 large onion, sliced
• 1 cup palm oil
• Scotch bonnet
• Locust beans (ogiri okpei, iru, dawadawa)
• Smoked or grilled tilapia (any fish of your choice)
• 2 fresh tomatoes
• Seasoning cubes; Maggi/Knorr
• 2 boiled eggs
• Salt to taste

Method

1. Rinse the garden eggs well and remove the stalk. Slice and blend the garden eggs together with tomatoes, fresh peppers and half of the onion.
2. Don’t have a blender? Cook garden eggs till soft, put in a mortar and pound together with pepper and tomatoes till it turns to a smooth puree.
3. Go to step 7 if you already have a smoked/grilled fish. Otherwise, clean fish – remove the intestines and the gills. Rinse the fish thoroughly to clean all the blood. Rub some salt all over the fish.
4. Place cleaned and salted fish on foil lined oven rack and cover with another sheet of aluminium foil. Set your oven to baking on 250°C.
5. The bake setting cooks the fish before the drying/smoking starts. Bake for about 15 minutes.
6. Remove fish from foil and change oven setting to grill and grill fish for about 10 extra minutes.
7. Put garden egg puree in a pot and cook till all or almost all the water dries up. Set it aside. Skip this step if you wish to fry your blended puree as you make your garden eggs stew.
8. Heat up palm oil in a dry pot. Once the oil heats up, add the sliced onions and fry for about 2 minutes. Add the garden egg puree and stir together.
9. Cover pot and cook-fry till the water in the puree dries up. You can easily tell this, when the palm oil has separated from the puree.
10. Add the ogiri okpei. Now, stir-in smoked fish. Add salt to taste, and adjust and add additional spices/seasonings if needed. Stir, cover and leave to simmer and it’s done.
11. Serve garden egg sauce with boiled yams, ripe/unripe plantain, cocoyam or boiled rice, top with boiled eggs.
12. Enjoy!

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