September 8, 2007, Morning- Hm. Delicious.

 

September 8, 2007

Morning

Sister Matilda plopped my plate in front of me this morning and the egg smell made my stomach turn.  I love eggs.  And except for the excessive salt, these are delicious.  Free range and organic, I’m sure.  It’s just that four days in a row is a bit much.  As is rice.  And yam.  Every meal is a slight variation of the last, and I think Sister Matilda is testing our tolerance by making each dish incrementally spicier.

Fried Yam & Salsa

Boiled Yam & Stew

The cornerstone of each meal is an enormous pile of carbohydrates, which are boiled, fried, or mashed.  When the rice and yam are boiled they come with stew, which is a misnomer, because when you think of a bowl of stew you envision chunks of delicious vegetables and a thick savory sauce.  This stew, however, is not stew.  It’s a tomato paste based dipping sauce.  Sometimes it has bits of scrambled egg, sometimes soggy cabbage, and sometimes, if you’re lucky, visible slips of red onion.  If the rice is fried, it’s called “jollof,” which is like fried rice, minus anything resembling a vegetable, plus extra oil and hot pepper.  I complain, but jollof is a welcomed respite from the plain rice or boiled or fried yam.  When the yam is fried it comes with a garnish of salsa, which is nice because you can actually see fresh tomato ground up, even if all you can taste is hot pepper. 

Peanut Stew & Rice Ball

Banku & Soup

Anything mashed comes with “soup,” which is also more of a dipping sauce, but at least it usually has a few chunks of okra or garden egg (tomato sized eggplant, but white in color).  A half cup of soup is served with rice balls, banku (bang-koo), akple (auwk-pl-le), kenkey (ken-kay), or fufu (foo-foo).  Rice balls are mashed (yes, mashed rice), shaped into a ball or a big lump, and served only with peanut stew.  Banku is ground and fermented corn that gets boiled into a playdough-like paste.  It tastes almost like unbaked sourdough and corn.  It’s like putting warm, sour, slimy, gooey playdough into your mouth.  I can’t decide if I like it or if it’s the worst thing I’ve ever eaten in my life.  Akple is exactly the same, except it’s not fermented, so it’s much more palatable.  It’s almost like eating very fine polenta dough.  Kenkey is exactly like eating polenta.  Fufu is made by boiling either yam, or cassava and plantains, and then pounding the shit out of it until it turns into a shiny, slimy, thick dough.  It’s every child’s favorite, but it’s so exhausting to make that they only get to have it on Christmas.  Apparently it’s eaten without chewing.  It’s the one thing I haven’t tried so far.  Edem says I can’t try it because it’s unsanitary because you sweat so much making it.  I think it’s just too much work, so he doesn’t want to ask Matilda.  I certainly don’t. 

There are specific rules as to what soup goes with which mashed carb, but I haven’t figured that out yet.  Some go with peanut soup, others with okra or garden egg.  Some with fish, some with chicken or goat.  At home I eat fish, but, shudder, not here.  The smell is abhorrent. 

It’s a shame, because the Volta Lake is so close that it’s considered part of the Greater Kpando area.  A five minute, thirty peswa cab ride will put you on the shore, standing next to the fishermen.  The minute the millions of tilapia are caught, they go straight into the frier and then to market, carried in tro tros and on women’s heads.  And that’s where they sit in row upon row of baskets for days in the sun with the flies.

Red Red

Bleh.

My mantra before lunch is “please no fish, please be red red.”  Which, as I mentioned, is delightful beans and delicious fried plantain.  I could eat a truckload of fried plantains.  They’re soft with little crispy bits, a little bit salty and a little bit sweet.  Sometimes they’re made with a little hot pepper.  MMMMmmmmm.

Usually Sister Matilda asks Sonjelle “what will you take for lunch.”  This morning Sonjelle was at the hospital with Nancy (possibly malaria), so Sister Matilda asked me instead.

“How about, um, red red?”

“Plantain finish,” she spat.  That means they’re all gone.  She looked at me accusingly.  She thinks that we should buy all the food at the market for ourselves (we already paid for food and board through Cosmic Volunteers).

“Uhh… soup with rice?”  That sounded good.  A nice little change from rice with hot sauce, or soup with fermented dough.

"It is not possible" she answered curtly.  "You will take rice with fish stew," and she turned on her heel, snatching up my empty egg sandwich plate.

(Photo of Fried Yam & Salsa courtesy of Erika, 2011; Photo of Peanut Stew & Rice Ball courtesy of Kristen, 2011)