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Could You Add More International Variety to Your Diet?

If I had to eat Nigerian food every day for the rest of my life, my diet would look something like this:

Breakfast: akara and pap, boiled yam and egg sauce, or beans and dodo

Lunch: eba and egusi soup, or other Nigerian soups

Dinner: white rice and tomato stew with beef or fried chicken

Even though these dishes are amazing and tasty (I’d encourage everyone to try them), they’d soon become boring if I had to eat them daily for life. I wouldn’t be able to experiment or enhance them. I couldn’t have made them healthier, more modern or acceptable. My kids wouldn’t be enjoying the variety of food that comes from my kitchen. Simply put, it would be boring.

Cuisine of the world

When the Portuguese arrived in Nigeria, Nigerians were able to introduce Jollof rice from Senegal. Curry sauce was adapted from India. Every Nigerian child loves noodles, which of course hail from China. English breakfast came into play too, along with many other cuisines. Nigerians are smart, and we learned how to adapt and use flavours from all over the globe to produce our own unique Nigerian flavours, which everyone has come to love.

Discovering new flavours

If I had eaten the same Nigerian cuisine every day, I wouldn’t have discovered the wonderful flavours of Italian pasta, French pastries and Spanish paella. I would have been blind to what the rest of the world eats. My taste buds wouldn’t have been trained to taste and recognise good food, identifying bad-tasting food more easily as well.

This shows how important it is to try foods from other cuisines:

It helps us appreciate other cultures

We can learn how to make dishes from other cuisines, improving our own dishes in the process instead of letting them become boring

We become internationally aware of other cuisines

We can discover and differentiate more flavours

It helps us recognise we are all related through one food or another

It helps us respect others, especially when we come together to eat

It helps us discover many more spices we can use to enhance our food

We can make choices because of the variety of options that come from around the world

Introducing Ataro Food and Spices

We are a company of West African origin, based in the Netherlands. Our mission is to introduce West African flavours to the Netherlands and other parts of Europe, and eventually to the rest of the world. We package spices from around the world, inspired by West African recipes. Our range includes chicken rubs, meat grills, vegetable seasonings, rice spices and soup spices.

About the founder, Ebere Akadiri

Ebere is a trained food science and technologist, an entrepreneur, event planner and trainer. Her love of food and entrepreneurial qualities combined to create Ataro Food and Spices. She creates perfectly-packaged signature spice blends, as well as organising events and teaching cooking, not to mention providing classes in entrepreneurship. She is also the founder of Beauty in Every Life, a foundation aimed at promoting entrepreneurship and self-confidence in women and children.

Ebere’s retail outfit, called Ataro’s Place, is set to open in September 2015. The grand opening is billed for 3rd October. She will host her cooking workshops in this location because of her love of seeing people learn to cook for themselves.

Please visit www.atarofood.nl/recipes for wonderful free recipe ideas to download.

West African cuisine to Netherlands

By Marcelineke.nl

The Nigerian entrepreneur Ebere Akadiri (43) brings the West African cuisine to the Netherlands with a new product line: ATARO food & Spices. Akadiri in the Netherlands has recently settled down with one great ambition: to introduce the West African cuisine worldwide in people's homes and in restaurants.Netherlands has its pilot market because, according to the Dutch Ebere open to new trends, especially when it comes to food. They will do so with its own product line and through workshops and cooking demonstrations. Behind the scenes, meanwhile also working hard on a West African cookbook... Read full text

Meet Ebere

By Dish Tales

When I told a friend that I was excited to feature a lovely lady on the blog who was going to introduce us all to Nigerian cuisine I could’ve known that the following joke was bound to be made: “Don’t they just eat cooked rice in Africa?”. A harmless (and somewhat tasteless) joke one might say. However, what troubled me more was that he followed by asking: “I mean, how do they even have cuisine?”. Being Persian and raised in both Europe and North America, I’m pretty much used to hearing mainstream stereotyping phrases on a daily basis. While all these ancient cultures with rich traditions, extraordinary spices and unique cuisine around the world are everyday being labelled with these stereotypes, Dishtales is proud to be a platform that brings together all fellow humans through the eyes of cuisine, paying tribute to their food heritage. Today we explore West African food in the kitchen of a Nigerian lady: Meet Ebere... Read full text