It’s too much spice! 🥵

Cloves; aromatic flower buds of a tree.

I rarely make a cooking mistake that I haven’t been able to salvage. That is, I’ve never really cooked a meal (well, I’ve burned a ton 😅) that I haven’t been able to chow down. It’s safe to say that I’m not an extraordinary cook, nor am I a terrible one either. I do make a mean pot of ẹ̀fọ́ ẹ̀gúsí though 😋.

A couple of days ago, I made a fail—one that was so bad I’ll call it my biggest cooking fail in recent times. Guess what I did? I made “Clove Soup.” Yeah, I know, I know, you’re wondering what that is 😌. Clove, for cooking non-enthusiasts, is an aromatic spice that has more effect on the scent and “feel” of a food than its taste.

So I was making a fish stew, right? Just a small sauce for breakfast’s rice (and I make nice rhymes—gerrit? 😅). In this Jagaban economy, where about 4 balls of tomatoes 🍅🍅🍅🍅 cost a thousand naira, it took a herculean effort even to get the ₦2000 worth I used for the stew that morning. Unfortunately, I ruined it all, but yeah, I’m just getting to that part 😁.

So, like the oversabi that I am o, I decided that my small, usually unremarkable fish stew needed to pack an extra layer of punch. I wanted that ‘wow factor’ for some reason (whyyyy??! 😩). And so, to the chagrin of my mother, as she was quite in a rush to go to work that morning, I took my time to boil the pọ̀nmọ́ and roasted catfish (something that was unnecessary, to be honest 😅), to get omi ẹ̀ràn (meat stock) as an additional sweetener.

Now, my usual spice range of ginger and black pepper and a special South African barbecue spice was exhausted at the time, and since I didn’t want to go “ordinary,” I needed to make up for it by using cloves, a decision that would have been okay in and out of itself, but the issue lay in the fact that I added a li’l too much…uhm, a lot, actually 🫢.

In my home, we’ve got powdered clove and clove buds, but I was only aware of the existence of the former. I thought the latter was some sort of herbal spice that could possibly elevate the taste of my stew, and yeah, like the experimental cook that I am, I added a HUGE (internal facepalm 🤦🏽‍♀️) handful to the blended tomato mixture, just before adding up to a teaspoon worth of the former. Now, we have a stew twice spiced…Yikes! 😬

Anyway, let me spare you the long and dreary barrage of how indescribable the meal (white rice with the stew) ended up tasting. It was all shades of sickly sweetness, throat-burning tanginess, and a weird aftertaste left on one’s tongue that I felt nausea in just two bites 🤢.

In retrospect, I wonder why I had to go through all that stress and extra-extra only to end up with food I couldn’t stomach. Perhaps it was truly a case of whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad!😅