West African Peanut & Sweet Potato Stew (Slow Cooker)

Peanuts, also called groundnuts by some, were taken by the Portuguese to other parts of the world, including Africa, from areas of Brazil, and perhaps from Peru, in the early 1500s. Peanuts are really a type of pea, not a true nut. Sweet potatoes were another New World food product, and they were taken to other parts of the world, including West Africa, by the Spanish and the Portuguese. This wonderful stew is easily made in a slow cooker and then served with flatbread like naan or pita.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 pounds sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into bite-size pieces
4 cloves of garlic, chopped
1 cup chopped onion (you can also use scallions with part of their green, if you'd like)
2 to 4 hot chilies (I use serrano chilies), chopped (seeded, if you don't like much heat)
2 to 3 inch piece ginger, peeled and chopped
2 tablespoons ground cumin
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 1/2 cups chicken stock (if the stew is too thick later, add a little more chicken stock)
1 can (14.5 to 16 ounces) diced tomatoes, with juice
1 can (14 to 16 ounces) chickpeas (also called garbanzo beans), drained and rinsed
1/2 cup peanut butter (smooth or chunky)
3 cups kale (or collard greens), removed from stems, then chopped 

Put all ingredients into a slow cooker (crock pot), except the chickpeas, peanut butter and kale/collard greens. Cook on "high" for 90 minutes, then reduce to "low" and let cook for another 4 1/2 hours. 
During the last hour of cooking, add the peanut butter and gently stir to mix it into the stew, and then add the kale or collards (either of which will cook down pretty quickly) and the chickpeas and again gently stir to mix all ingredients together. If the stew is too thick for you, thin it out a little with more chicken stock at this time also.

WORD HISTORY:
Cola-This word goes back to the Niger-Congo languages,^ which have a large presence in Africa, including in part of West Africa (for example, in Senegal, Gambia, Ivory Coast), where the term was "kola/kolo," and it was used as the name for a tree and the nut from the tree, which contains caffeine and was used in beverages. "Apparently" the name spread through Spanish and Portuguese to South America and then elsewhere, but with the use of the Latin "c" for the ''k" sound used in some other languages, as both Spanish and Portuguese are Latin-based languages. The word was borrowed by English circa 1800, but the biggest boost to the word in English came in the 1880s in the United States with the invention of the brand name beverage "Coca-Cola," which used cola nuts in its preparation and which eventually became an internationally known drink and one of the world's best known brand names. This was followed not long thereafter by the brand name "Pepsi-Cola" and other drinks using cola nuts.    

^  The Niger-Congo family of languages includes many African languages and dialects, including Zulu, Swahili and Fulani. Niger-Congo is to these languages what Indo European is to, for example, English, German, Italian, Hindustani or Persian (and many others).