4 minute read
Moqueca de Camarão
BRAZIL | LAURA AGUIAR
This is one of my favourite Brazilian dishes: moqueca de camarão (shrimp coconut stew). Brazilian cuisine is very varied and has been mostly influenced by our Portuguese colonisers, Italian immigrants, and African slaves.
Moqueca is a non-spicy curry dish and there are different types. It’s made with seafood, tomatoes, garlic, onion, coconut milk, dendê palm oil, and coriander, and is usually accompanied by rice and farofa (cassava root flour). The one I make is with shrimp and on the day I made it, the sun was shining so nicely that it made me feel much closer to home. You can make it vegan by replacing the seafood with other veggies.
Cooking Time: 40–50 minutes Serves: 8
Ingredients
½ kg shrimp 1 lime 2 onions, chopped 3 garlic cloves 1 red pepper 1 green pepper 4 tomatoes, chopped • 4 tbsp olive oil • coriander • parsley • paprika powder (I used a little bit of this to replace dendê oil as I couldn’t find it in Belfast) • salt and black pepper • 300ml (1 can) coconut milk
Method
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5. Coat the shrimp with lime juice, salt, and pepper, and let it sit in a bowl. In a large covered pan, coat the bottom of pan with about 2 tablespoons of olive oil and heat on medium. Add the chopped onion and garlic and cook a few minutes until softened. Add the peppers, tomatoes, and coconut milk. Stir everything until it starts to boil and then add the shrimp and the paprika powder. Bring soup to a simmer, reduce the heat, cover, and let simmer for 15 minutes until the shrimp are cooked. Taste and adjust seasonings (salt, coriander, parsley, and black pepper). Serve it with cooked basmati rice.
About Laura
My ‘Irish’ journey began in 2001 when I left Brazil for the first time at the tender age of fifteen to visit my aunt and her family in Rathmullan, County Donegal.
I spent the summer there improving my English and helping look after my cousin, Kate, who was three at the time. Five years later, while doing a BA in Journalism and working as a journalist in my hometown of Belo Horizonte (southeast of the country), I decided to take a sixmonth break to return to Donegal to continue improving my English and also to realise my dream of backpacking around Europe. After that, I knew that I wanted to live and settle in Ireland—north, south, east, west, it didn’t matter, I had to return.
I left Brazil for good in 2008, first going to Galway city for a year to undertake a preparatory course to sit the the Cambridge Certificate of Proficiency in English (CPE) and then to Stockholm,
in Sweden, for two years to do a master’s in Media and Communication Studies. A practice-based PhD in Film Studies brought me back to the island of Ireland, this time to Belfast, in 2011. The PhD gave me the opportunity to not only enhance my research and teaching skills, but also to discover a passion for archives and make a documentary film called We Were There. The film was about the women’s experiences of the Maze/ Long Kesh Prison, and it was screened across the world at festivals, universities, schools, and community groups.
After a four-year stint working as a postdoctoral researcher in Cork city, I decided to ‘payback’ all the love and welcoming I have received in Rathmullan, my ‘Irish hometown’, by founding and setting up the Rathmullan Film Festival with the local community. I run this participatory, notfor-profit festival remotely on a pro-bono basis and 2021 was our fourth year. It’s wonderful to see locals getting involved in filmmaking and the festival going from strength to strength each year.
In 2018, I returned to Belfast to work on the wonderful Making the Future project. The project has enabled me to work with individuals and groups in engagement programmes like Our Food, Our Place and I feel very blessed to engage with so many interesting people and stories and capture them in creative ways for PRONI’s archives.
I think that’s me settled in the North now!
>> Cooking playlist
Brazil has a HUGE musical diversity and there are some genres that I really like and others that I don’t. So my top five are songs from artists of the genres that I really like. Chico Buarque is one of our most famous singers and a lot of his songs are about the Brazilian dictatorship period (1964-85). Vai Passar is a lively samba song. Falamansa plays forró music, a genre from the Northeast of Brazil which I love, though I am not a good dancer. Elis Regina had a wonderful voice and she was one of our main representatives of the MPB genre (a.k.a Brazilian popular music). My hometown has a band called Skank and their songs are a mixture between alternative rock, ska, and reggae genres. Tanto is their Portuguese version of Bob Dylan’s ‘I Want You’. The band Nação Zumbi emerged from the manguebeat movement of the ‘90s in Recife (Northeast of Brazil). This genre mixes regional rhythms of the Northeast including maracatu, frevo, forró, rock, and electronic music. Some of you may find their songs a bit too noisy, but I love them!
‘Vai Passar’ by Chico Buarque ‘Xote dos Milagres’ by Falamansa ‘Como Nossos Pais’ by Elis Regina Any song from the band Skank ‘Samba Makossa’ by Nação Zumbi
