Kenyan Nyoyo

Perhaps you tried one of Operation Rice Bowl’s Haitian recipes featured on FFF during the last couple of weeks. These recipes, and others shared during Lent this year, provide an opportunity to connect with the poor throughout the world and take steps to share your resources with them.

Operation Rice Bowl, a Lenten program sponsored by Catholic Relief Services, helps to ensure that CRS can provide assistance to those in need in more than 100 countries. CRS uses 75 percent of the gifts received to fund vital programs around the world — the other 25 percent of the donations remain in the diocese where they were collected to support local hunger and poverty alleviation efforts.

CRS and its partners work with the poorest farm families and communities, as well as with laborers, the landless, communities suffering from HIV and AIDS and victims of manmade and natural disasters worldwide. The agency works in many remote areas with harsh climates and fragile, degraded ecosystems.

Kenya is another of ORB’s featured countries this year. This easy-to-make Kenyan dish is not only colorful but is also flavorful, healthy and filling. If you don’t eat black-eyed peas often, this is a recipe where they blend in nicely with other delicious ingredients. CJK

Kenyan Nyoyo

(Operation Rice Bowl)

1 medium onion, finely chopped

1 tbsp. olive oil

1 medium red bell pepper, finely chopped*

1 tsp. paprika

2 large tomatoes, sliced*

1 can black-eyed peas

2 cups corn, cooked*

Salt and pepper to taste

Rice, cooked

Sauté onion in oil until browned. Add pepper and sauté for two to three minutes. Add paprika and tomatoes and simmer for 5 minutes. Drain black-eyed peas and combine with corn. Add to onion mixture and season with salt and pepper to taste. Mix well, cover and simmer for 15 minutes. Add water if necessary. Serve hot over rice. 

Yield: 4 to 6 servings

A note from Carol: When I prepared this dish, I used a 14.5 oz. can of diced tomatoes instead of the fresh ones. I added all the juice with the tomatoes so the mixture didn’t need extra water for cooking. In fact, I bypassed the first 5 minutes of simmering called for in the recipe and added the paprika, tomatoes, black-eyed peas and canned corn to the onion mixture all at once — it took about 15 minutes of simmering before it was ready to serve. Although the recipe calls for a red bell pepper, a green one would work equally well and you could also choose to add a clove or two of garlic when sautéing the onion and pepper.