Cayenne and Red Onion Nyama Choma Dry-fry

In my country it is almost an abomination to throw away left overs of any meal. In the Kenyan spirit of resourcefulness, all meals that are left over from the current meal are set aside to be eaten as part of or for the next meal. Wastefulness is totally discouraged in our culture. And I believe that is a totally fantastic thing.

But lets be honest, at times having left-overs over and over can sometimes be monotonous. Hence it is always advisable to change things up and add new flavors to and transform an already awesome meal. Following the Madaraka day celebrations, we had some left over nyama-choma. To make this richer and tastier, we usually turn this into a dry fry. The process of frying it tenderizes the meat further but it still retains that smokey flavor. The onions and the chilli enhance the flavor of the nyama choma meat so well. It is soo good, just typing this made me salivate.

PREP TIME:  5 MIN       COOK TIME: 25 MIN       SERVES: 6

Nyama-choma dry fry Ingredients

Left over nyama choma, about 500 grams

1/2 a teaspoon of cayenne pepper, or freshly chopped chili

1 tablespoon of black pepper

2 small red onion, sliced

4 cloves of garlic, minced

1/4 of a thumb sized garlic, root minced

2 tomatoes, grated

Method

In a frying pan, heat some vegetable oil. Go easy on the cooking oil since the meat has some fat of its own too. Add the onions, black pepper and the cayenne and fry them until they are soft. To this add the nyama choma. Let this fry with the onions on medium high heat until they develop a deeper color.

As I had said on my Instagram page a few days back, Cayanne is fast becoming one of my favorite spices to use in the kitchen since it adds the perfect amount of heat without it being too hot or overpowering. You can try it too and it will slowly grow on you as it did on me. The large can costs just KES.120 (approx $1.3).

Add your tomatoes and the minced ginger and garlic. The garlic is added at this stage so that it wouldn’t burn if added with the onions and also to make their taste a lot more intense when added at a later stage.

Mix it all in, add a 1/4 cup of hot water (not more than this amount!!!!) and cover with a lid and allow this to simmer for 5- 10 minutes. This will develop the flavor of the spices  and bring out the juices of the nyama-choma. Remove from heat. You can garnish if you want to but I chose not to.

When you upgrade an already awesome dish, you simply create magic. This is one of those instances. Note the change in color between the two nyama choma pictures below before dry frying it and after.  It looks so good, doesn’t it?

The house smelt really good too. It is one of those aromas you would want to walk in to during a rainy evening. Then sit and eat this juicy nyama choma with hot ugali with some traditional veggies such as kanzira or managu.

Plus, it was so tender it literally slid of the bone when you bit through it. And the best part is that the nyama choma dry fry still retained the smokey taste. Yum!

Do you have some left over nyama-choma? Do your self a favor and make this.

Which other left over do you have in your fridge?  Do you have left over rice? you can make this Chinese fried rice, this very easy sweet corn fried rice or my pea and tomato fried rice. Do you have left over spaghetti? Transform that into my spaghetti marinara.  Or maybe you have left over mashed potatoes…. make some potato cakes with those.

Cheers to great food!

-Miss Kaluhi A.D.

Download the full recipe here

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