Food Adventure

Red-Red

The food has been great so far!
I have eaten Jollof rice, which is a spicy rice with chicken or whatever else you want to serve with it.

I have had peanut stew which is very tasty. It is spicy and has beef/goat/chicken in a broth of peanutbutter, oil, and the spice paste. You serve it with riceballs or yam. Personally I prefer the yam, although the rice balls are really tasty.

Another dish is Red-Red. This one is one of my favorites! It is simply fried plantain serves with beans that are in the red spicy oil and have the dried, fried, ground cassava sprinkled on top. This makes the whole thing more solid and easier to spoon up. It is a little sweet and a little spicy and very hearty.

For another dinner we had spicy beef sausage in red sauce and white rice. Plain but better than anything i have tasted back in the states!

Another of my favorites is Do kon-na chi-num (spelled incorrectly but pronounced this way). These are little fried herrings which i ate with a spicy red sauce and a corn product. It is corn that is ground then soaked and fermented and then cooked and formed into a square and rapped in plantain leaves. Its good in small quantities or else it is very overpowering.

My latest taste was of Fufu. To describe it is difficult. It is prepared by cleaning and boiling cassava and plantain. They are drained well and then pounded together in a mortar with a huge pestle. (For some science knowledge the pestle is made from the Esa tree, as it is locally known. Scientific name celtis milabraedii.) The final consistency is the same as toothpaste, smooth and thick.

My mother, Matilda, pounding Fufu

I ate it with fish stew which was tasty and spicy! There were little herrings, perch and catfish in it.It is a tomato base thickened with little eggplant like peppers and really spiced up. It stews for a while and is bright red.
The fufu is used like bread/a spoon. You take a silver dollar sized chunk and mush it onto your index and middle finger forming an indentation. You then use this to scoop up the soup and try to get everything into your mouth. Then you swallow. NO CHEWING! The toothpaste consistency seems more like mucus if you chew and that makes it nasty. My mother thankfully corrected me before i repeated that process a second time...

The food adventure has been a lot of fun so far. There is always bananas, pineapple, and papaya available on the street as well. The bread is also very tasty here. I have toast and and egg with shallot and black tea for breakfast each morning. Pretty good for me!