My mother in-law has been staying with us over the last couple of weeks and even though it's been great coming home from work to home cooked meals, it has come at a particular cost and that is a style of cooking that I'm not particularly fond of. Now even though my mother-in law is pretty conscious about what she eats, she's still quite traditional in how she prepares her dishes and hasn't quite made the connection on some of the dangers associated with her style of cooking.
One thing about West African cooking is that although it has the potential to be healthy, some of the methods and practices used when cooking aren't all that healthy from a traditional stand-point. Take the ever so popular West African red stew. It's pretty healthy when you consider everything that's used to prepare the stew from your onions, to your red-peppers, hot chilli peppers, tomatoes and meats. However when you factor in the process of cooking- sauteing your onions and preparing your meats- it involves use of a lot of oil especially for deep-frying.
My husband and I made the switch years back on how we prepare popular West African dishes by minimizing and completely eliminating the process of deep-frying as a way to prepare our food, especially with our meats. Now when we make popular stews and soups, we are more conscious about how we prepare our meals and how much oil we're using in the process. For example, when preparing our meats we broil our meat in the oven rather than fry it. And when it comes to the use of oil to prepare these dishes particularly when sauteing vegetables, we use as little as we can get away with. Since doing this we have generally felt much better after sitting down to a meal and I'm sure our bodies have thanked us as a result of it.
For someone who's trying to become a lot more health conscious as she is, I do hope to muster up enough courage to educate my mother-in-law on the dangers of consuming more oil in her diet than she needs to especially when it comes to deep-frying.
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