I hosted one of my book clubs this weekend. For this book club we always meet at someone’s house and the host prepares food that is somehow thematically tied to the book. Sometimes that is easier than others depending on how often food is talked about in the particular book you’re reading. My pick for book club was Americanah by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

This particular book club does thematic choices. Each person hosts once under a particular theme and then we pick a new one. This book was our first read for our current theme of non-American authors. The book is about a Nigerian woman who emigrates to the United States and then chooses to return to Nigeria after 15 years. It’s a really excellent book. I highly recommend it. I’ll eventually have a fuller review of the book on my book reviews blog once I catch up over there.

Anyway, most of the food the author mentions is the character’s experience eating American foods like hot dogs and McDonalds, none of which I was going to feed my book club. She did have one scene set around making coconut rice and chicken. I made the coconut rice from this recipe, which was delicious though I would skip the parboiling step as I thought the rice got too mushy though the flavors were great.

I used this recipe for the chicken. I’m sure I would have figured it out on my own, but the comments were super helpful to remind me use a splatter screen in all the steps. I’m sure it saved me a huge mess. That was a nice change from usual recipe comments which normally wind up being hundreds of people saying all the ways they changed the recipe such that it no longer resembles the initial recipe and is impossible to tell if that recipe is actually any good.

I was going to make fried plantains because she does mention plantains in the book, but I didn’t plan far enough ahead and all the plantains at the store were super green. I stumbled across bags of plantain chips in the international aisle though, so I was lazy and just got those. It wasn’t mentioned in the book at all, but I found a recipe for a Nigerian dessert called shuku shuku, and I made those. I also through together a salad that was in no related to Nigerian food nor the book, but I thought it might be nice to have something in the meal that wasn’t beige.

I think everything turned out pretty well, and we had a very lively discussion surrounding the book even though I’m the only one who wound up having enough time to finish it after we decided on the date fairly close to our actual meeting.