Mexican Soup Morisqueta

My mother-in-law, from Michoacan makes a soup called morisqueta. It is made
with pork bones for flavor and a mixture of chile ancho and guajillo.
Sometimes, towards the end,she adds cabbage. Then she serves it with rice that is
very sticky, very gooey (originally, I thought she did not know how to make
white rice).

Several years ago, while in Ghana, Africa, I came across peanut soup that
was served with a thick pasty "fufu". The fufo was used almost as bread (but
it had more the consistency of the rice mentioned above), one was supposed to
shape the fufu it in a scoop and take in the soup with your hands. The soup
reminded me very much of my mother-in-law's recipe - spicy, yet plain. The
filler was of course the sticky, almost gooey rice.

Looking up "morisqueta" in our dictionary, I found out that it was an arabic
term used for rice, that was made in just the same fashion as my
mother-in-law's soup. It was then that I realized the close connection between the two
cultures (Arabic) and (Mexican), via Africa!