It's the season for eggplants, peppers tomatoes garlic and Kanga Ma so we thought we'd put them all together and came up with this great treat.

Prepare the Corn

Put 1 cup of dry flour corn (Kaanga Ma, or Blue Hopi, Pink Hopi, Hokianga Yellow and Red etc.) into a pot with 3 cups of ash water made by taking clean ash from your woodstove or lighting a special fire with dry clean wood and collecting the ash. Put the ash into a large jar so that it fills the jar 1/4 of the way up. Then fill the jar with water and let the water clear. It will be soapy and a strong alkaline liquid at that point. If you have charcoal in with your ash it will float so take it off the top.  Bring the pot to the boil and simmer for 30 minutes then, adding as much water as you need to stop the corn from drying out, turn off and leave over night. Bring to the boil again the next day and simmer until the corn is swollen and puffed open, and quite soft. In traditional Central America this is called posole and can be used for many things - it's great in soup instead of the soup mixes we used to buy, can be put through the corn grinder and then used to make all kinds of traditional Central American dishes. We tip the pot of posole and ash water into a colander and run clean water over it to clean the posole. Then put the posole into a bucket of fresh cold water and rub it until the husks float off. Float off as many as you can and then put the posole through the corn grinder as fine as possible.

Making Tortillas

Now you have bowl of ground cooked corn, which you can form into balls in your hand and then put a plastic sheet (or banana leaf ) on the bench, place your corn ball on top, add another plastic sheet or leaf and roll out into a tortilla with the rolling pin. Heat the pan really hot, the top of the wood stove or barbeque fire is even better, roll the plastic off the top of the tortillas pick the tortilla up using the bottom sheet of plastic, tip your hand over so the tortilla goes into the pan and then quickly roll the plastic off the top of it. Turn over when it is beginning to get a few brown patches and take out when cooked.

Layering Vegetables

Once you have a pile of tortillas, place one in the bottom of your lasagne dish, layer your sauteed eggplant, tomato, hot and sweet peppers, garlic, onion and basil and make as many layers as you wish. When you have gone as high as you want place a tortilla on top and liberally sprinkle with cheese.

Cook in moderate oven so the top doesn't burn.

(Taken from Kay's Regular Update,  28th March 2008.)