Somali Spaghetti

An unusual and delicious take on an old favorite

This meal was a huge hit on the first night of my recent Virginia section hike. Well, I was alone that night, but it WAS a huge hit with my stomach! I’m not normally super hungry on the first night out, but this meal kind of stoked my appetite. It was a fitting reward after a day that included lightning, rain and hail.

You’ll need a couple of fresh ingredients (onion and garlic) and a tube of Amore tomato paste (which also got used with my other meals on this trip) as well as a couple of unusual ingredients. Vegeta seasoning is one of them, and maybe it’s not that rare to use it, but I’d never heard of it before. It’s an all-purpose seasoning with its roots in Croatia. The other is xawaash spice. Xawaash actually was hard to find, but it’s what makes the dish. It’s a traditional Somali spice mix that might remind you of a curry. It contains cumin, coriander, fenugreek, turmeric, sage, black peppercorns, ginger, green cardamom pods, whole cloves, nutmeg and cinnamon.

The pile of non-fresh ingredients looks like this:

INGREDIENTS:

1 small onion, diced

3 cloves garlic, minced

1 TB dehydrated red and green bell pepper mix

4 oz. freeze-dried ground beef

A snack-sized ziploc halfway filled with dehydrated and/or freeze-dried tomato dices (I used a mix of both)

1 TB Amore tomato paste

1/2 TB xawaash

1/2 TB natural sugar

1 tsp. Litehouse cilantro

1/2 tsp. black pepper

1 TB Vegeta seasoning

1 packet of olive oil

6 oz. of spaghetti broken into 1-2″ pieces

Package things in mini and snack-sized ziplocs and put it all in a quart-sized ziploc

DIRECTIONS:

Add a little water to the baggies containing the meat and vegetables, and set aside.

Cook spaghetti in the usual manner, drain and set aside.

Saute onion until translucent. Add garlic and saute for an additional minute.

Blend in the bell pepper and stir for a minute over medium heat.

Add ground beef and stir for several minutes, again over medium heat.

Add the xawaash, tomatoes and tomato paste, stir to blend.

Add Vegeta seasoning and sugar, stir to blend. Add just enough water to make a “saucy” consistency. But not too much. This is meant to be a thick sauce. But you do want enough water so that things won’t burn to the bottom of the pot.

Cover, simmer over low heat for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Serve over spaghetti, top with cilantro and black pepper to taste.

I would consider this enough to feed one seriously hungry hiker. You could stretch it easily enough to cover a pair of average appetites by cooking a little more spaghetti. It all looks like this once it’s all cooked: