How to Make Diaspora Vegetable Soup (9 Easy Steps)

Diaspora Vegetable Soup as the name implies is a soup for Nigerians who are based outside, you do not need a specific ingredient to prepare this vegetable soup. It can be made with whatever you can get. There are alternative ingredients that you can find anywhere in the world.  You can make the soup wherever you find yourself and still get the Nigerian taste of the soup. It is a diaspora because it is made outside Nigeria.  

Diaspora Vegetable Soup Ingredients

These ingredients are very important for your diaspora vegetable soup, you may not have all the ingredients or much when it comes to quantity but you can still make the soup with the necessary ones.

1. 2kg Frozen Spinach
2. 500g Lamb’s Lettuce (or watercress)
3. 1 cup Pretend Palm Oil
4. Meat, fish, and shellfish:
   1. 1.2kg beef
   2. 500g Cow tripe (shaki)
   3. 600g codfish
   4. 180g shrimps
   5. 150g ham bits
5. 2 red onions
6. 3 seasoning cubes (beef flavor)
7. 1 fresh paprika (sweet pepper)
8. Any hot and spicy pepper:
   1. Cayenne Pepper or
   2. Habanero pepper or
   3. Scotch bonnet pepper or
   4. Black pepper or
   5. White pepper
9. Salt (to taste)

These are the ingredients you need for your diaspora vegetable soup.

What to know about the Diaspora Vegetable Soup ingredients

You have to note this about cooking your diaspora vegetable soup.

1. Frozen spinach is the best form of spinach for this. Defrost it naturally that is on your kitchen counter not in a microwave oven, chop it into smaller pieces, and press out the excess water. If you can’t buy frozen spinach where you live, use leafy spinach but you need to blanch it first and remove all the water before adding it to the soup. I will prepare this recipe again using leafy spinach. But that’s when this lockdown is over.
2. Lamb’s Lettuce is an alternative to water leaves. Its job is to add some nice mild taste to the soup. It’s common in North America. If you are in the UK, you can try watercress. But if you can’t buy these two, you can skip them and add more onions to mask the strong taste of spinach. Some people say they use kale but the kale I can buy where I live is very bitter and fibrous. For that, I do not recommend kale.
3. Pretend palm oil is the oil I pour out after frying tomato stew. Click here to watch me fry tomato stew base and at the end, you will see me pour out the excess oil. The oil is red but not as red as palm oil that’s why I call it to pretend palm oil. It’s not good for all Nigerian soups but it’s ok for Vegetable soup and some other Nigerian soups that do not contain starchy thickeners.
4. I highly recommend red onions because it adds a special taste to this soup that helps mask the strong taste of spinach. If you can’t buy red onions where you live, use white onions.
5. I use Knorr cubes (classic flavor), buy any beef flavored stock cubes.
6. Ham bits add a nice taste to this meal but if you do not eat pork you can use liver or kidney (chopped into small pieces, see video).
7. Cow tripe (shaki, towel) is available anywhere beef is available but if they do not sell the cow intestines where you live (I heard that they throw them away in some countries), you can skip it and replace it with more beef.
8. Cod is fresh stockfish. Yes, that fish we call stockfish is dry cod. Since the dry one is not available outside Nigeria (they export the dry one to Africa), use the frozen one which is available in lots of places in the world.
9. Shrimps are basically fresh crayfish but if you do not like the taste of seafood, roast the shrimps in your oven to get crayfish then grind it before adding to the soup. Click here for how to roast shrimps to perfection to get crayfish.

The diaspora vegetable soup can be eaten with any swallow.