Witches' Brew

(The below is copied exactly from an e-mail from my mom.)

A strange name for a recipe - isn’t it?

Indeed, it warrants a little explanation.

We worked in a university in Nigeria and lived on-campus along with other expatriate and non-expatriate staff - about a thousand plus families. Power outages and erratic water supply was quite common. For the convenience of the university community, the university built a dam on the campus that supplied water to the residential area on the campus. In addition, each house was provided with a 500-gallons water-tank as reserve water supply. Conservation & improvisation were the two most common practices.

However, the electric supply was not within the scope of the university and we lived with the erratic power supply managed by NEPA (National Electric Power Agency of Nigeria). Whenever, there was an outage (which was quite often), opening the refrigerators or freezers was a “No, no…”. Just as the electricity would go off, we would attack the refrigerator and quickly drag out all the left-over vegetables from the frig knowing fully well that it might be a while before we would be able to open either the frig or the freezer. So, all the retrieved itty-bitty things went into an improvised concoction looking like soup/stew.

The name Witches’ Brew was given to the concoction by my children. They (Gaggan and Candy) would come in after playing outdoors with their friends and would see me stirring something in a big cauldron in the dim candle light; they would also join in stirring the cooking brew with their ladles; our long shadows falling on the kitchen walls. We, in our hooded sweat jackets, looked like three Macbethian witches stirring their brew. Hence, the name Witches’ Brew.

The Brew can be served as a whole meal with side dishes, like salads, chips, croutons, tortillas etc. I usually serve with toasted garlic bread from the bakery. Just be creative.

Enjoy the recipe!

Ingredients

(Cooking time: 45 minutes to an hour.)

Water 8-10 cups, as desired + ¼ cup

Lentils/ Urad Dal ¾ cup
Onion 1 (large), sliced
Potatoes 1 -1 ½ cup, uniformly cubed
Green Beans ¾ -1 cup, ½” cut
Peas ¾ cup, (optional, if beans used
Carrots 1 cup, ½” or round circles (as desired)
Cauliflowers/ Broccoli 1 cup, flowerets
Tomatoes 2-3 cups, roughly diced

Spices

Cinnamon 1 stick (big)
Salt 1 teasp. or as desired
Corn starch 2-3 tabsp., for thickening

Garnishing

Parsley/Cilantro 2 tabsp., finely chopped

Method

In a big deep pot (4-6 quarts), put the lentils and the spices together to cook.
Start it on a high heat. Once it starts a rolling boil, add the raw vegetables and cook on reduced heat (low medium).
Cook till all the ingredients reach the consistency of a stew/soup.
In a bowl, mix the corn starch in ¼ cup of cold water. Take a cupful of the hot soup and mix it slowly with the corn starch, stirring constantly so that the mixture does not get lumpy.
Pour this corn starch mixture in the main pot, constantly stirring to avoid the lumps in the soup.
Garnish with parsley or cilantro (each serving bowl or the whole pot of soup). Add a spoonful of butter (cream cheese or feta cheese, as desired). Serve hot with toasted garlic bread or croutons of your choice.

Tips

The beauty of preparing the Witches’ Brew is that any left over veggies can be used – added or substituted. Okro (Ladies’ Fingers) is the only vegetable to be avoided as it draws.

Ground meat can be added at any stage of the cooking for the non-vegetarians. Just brown the ground meat in a fry-pan before adding to the soup mixture and let it simmer along with all the other ingredients.

Left-over chicken, cut into small pieces, from an earlier meal can be added. Add at any stage of the cooking and simmer it in the soup.

If some of the vegetables that are to be used in the brew are frozen and some are fresh, then add them to the cooking brew at different intervals. Frozen vegetables, like beans & peas, may be added 5-7 minutes before the brew is ready. All the raw vegetables need to be added initially along with the starter ingredients together.