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I referenced food preparation techniques, flavors, and customs throughout my journal from Ghana because food is such a vital and visible part of every culture.
My host mother, with Grace’s help, made fufu last night. Though she denied me the chance to help, I made her promise to let me try next time. First, she used a machete to peel and chop plantains and cassava roots into roughly Ping Pong ball-sized pieces. Then, she washed those and boiled them on an outdoor, small, charcoal stove for a while. After they cooled, the mashing began. My host mother put the pieces one by one into a circular, wooden basin which was maybe a foot across and with a three-inch high rim. She fed the pieces in while Grace pounded a heavy branch with dried grass on the end into the basin. Once enough pieces had been mashed up, my host mother folded the mash in to the center which, with the continued pounding, was a mechanism similar to kneading. This continued until the plantains or cassava resembled bread dough. A spicy sauce and fish were put on the starch, and the dish was eaten with the hands. She made a less spicy sauce for me (which was almost too spicy for me), and told me to eat my whole dish, which was the size of an American serving dish. I was proud of myself for almost getting through half of it, by which time I was quite full.
In the afternoon, I made pasta with sautéed vegetables so that my host family could try an American dish. It turned out quite well, and my host father was very complementary of my cooking. I cut the tomatoes, onions, green peppers, and carrots the African way (outside, with a machete, and without a cutting board) and mashed the garlic with a traditional wooden pestle. The meal was, by far, the highlight of the day.
Thus, I never complain when the bell rings and we can stretch our legs and, if it is break, visit the cafeteria. Housed in a separate building, the “Canteen” has long, traditional lunch tables with benches. They sell a variety of pastries, candies, fruits, and Ghanaian dishes at different stands and stations in and around the Canteen. During morning break—11am or so—I buy bananas and peanuts from a stand outside the Canteen; this is the healthiest and most anticipated meal I eat on a daily basis. During afternoon break—3pm or so—I either eat the rice, spaghetti, cabbage, and chicken dish the Canteen sells or leftovers brought from the house. I never enjoyed cafeteria food in the States, but the food they cook here is delicious!
Do Ghanaians eat together, or does each one eat when they want to?
The only time I have seen my host family eat together is on Sundays when I cook American food. I'm not quite sure why that prompts them to eat together, but it is really nice, even if it's only once a week. In general though, each person just eats when he or she wants to.
One subject I will revisit, regarding yesterday, is food preparation. Hopefully, you find this as enthralling as I do. Dinner last night was jolof rice and fish. Before she began, I referred to my stomach and requested that she use only a little bit of oil. She seemed to understand this, even if the half liter of sunflower grease she used in the meal suggested otherwise. First, she called a fish vendor off the street to come into the compound and sell us six thin, grey, non-descript fish that she had bought from the harbor that morning. The vendor scaled, gutted, and rinsed the fish, employing a wooden block to hack at the nose and fins with a machete. I rather impressed myself in tolerating this performance. Once my host mother rinsed them in a saltwater solution, she coated them in corn flour (there is no wheat here) and deep-fat fried them in a pan sitting on charcoal. Next, she combined fresh, chopped tomatoes, canned tomato paste, corned beef, spices, and oil in another charcoal-heated pot. Having added some water, she filled the pot with dry rice and, as is customary for her to do with rice, stuffed a large plastic bag between the rice and lid to act a seal for the steam. Thirdly, Grace and I chopped cabbage, green pepper, cucumber, and lots of carrots. These were rinsed in vinegar-water but remained uncooked. I insisted on dabbing the surface of the fish with a clean rag, and the yielded grease was enough to soak through and stain my skirt. Oh well. I mixed the salad and rice and accompanied it with two pieces of fish. It was delicious!
As a final note--and as my dinner approaches--I will briefly discuss new foods from the past week. Wednesday, my supper was Groundnut (peanut) Soup with fish and fufu. It was exceptionally tasty, particularly with the fish, which I am becoming increasingly fond of--partly because I'm getting better at avoiding the bones. I think Groundnut Soup was cooked Wednesday in honor of my host sister's twelfth birthday (also Wednesday), as it is her favorite dish. Last night, my host mother made Rice-Ball to go with the leftover soup, which was basically a patty of sticky, stirred, cooked rice. It was similar to other Ghanaian starches in texture, but because it was made of rice, it was not as heavy, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I have settled into a routine of snacks I eat during the second break (2:40pm-3pm). Twice a week--usually Tuesday and Thursday--I indulge in the first edible school cafeteria meals I've ever experienced. The jolof rice is delightfully filling. The other three days, I sample different Ghanaian snacks. These are divisible into two broad categories--packaged and homemade. Packaged munchies are often imported from Lebanon or Egypt, as referenced by the Arabic translation on the wrappers. Of these, my favorite is Magic crackers, which remind me a little of Ritz. Homemade delicacies are distinguishable by their unmarked, clear, plastic trappings. Despite the FDA's probable dissension of their lack of labeling, no one gets sick from them, so I judge them to be safe. Some of these eatables are freshly made pastries--including a peculiar creation called a meat pie--while others resemble the contents of a grocery store's chips aisle. I enjoy most the plantain chips--crispy fried slices of plantain.
Dinner last night was banku with okra stew, the same meal as my first Ghanaian supper (back in January). Several other Ghanaian tribes have different variations of this dish, but all are made with ground corn, ground cassava, and water; the discrepancies arise, I believe, in the order of combination of these ingredients. For banku, corn and water are heated and stirred before an aqueous cassava solution is added. The doughy paste is very tough, so a special device is employed to hold the pot still on the charcoal, thus enabling the continued manhandling of the long, wooden, stirring utensil. The innovation in question is a pair of metal rods with hooks on one end and a connecting rod on the other. The hooks are threaded through the pot's small handles, and the other ends are placed on the ground. From the all-purpose stool the chef sits on, she places her bare feet on the rods and firmly holds them in place. My host mother allowed me to take over briefly, and I found the set-up rather natural, though watching her work was deceptive; she made the stirring look no harder than it would be with Play-Doh. Okra stew is an odd dish, with an enormous amount of okra swimming in a sticky, orange liquid. Like fufu, banku is eaten by detaching a bite-size piece of starch, dipping it in the accompanying stew, and swallowing the mouthful whole--I, however, stubbornly cling on to the American practice of chewing one's food. My host mom repeatedly demonstrates the proper way to eat, though I wish such cultural instructional sessions occurred at a different time, as my appetite is already miniscule by Ghanaian standards.
Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, I ate waakye for lunch. According to my host father, this dish has a long preparation process, so it is more often bought than cooked. As such, we acquired the delicacy from nearby fast food stands, which join "provisions stores" (such as my host mother's), hair salons (spelled "saloons" here--makes me laugh every time), and tailoring shops in the group of popular, mother-owned establishments. Similar to other members of this group, fast food stands are usually constructed next to the home. They sport hand-painted, plywood signs, advertising available dishes with detailed drawings of fully-loaded plates. From a sweating, apron-clad woman, my host sister bought me the smallest increment of waakye offered, together with three times the usual undressed coleslaw portion and a dollop of greasy spaghetti. Waakye--pronounced wah-cheh--is rice with mashed soy (I think) beans. I do not know much about the preparation, but the rice somehow absorbs the reddish brown color from the beans. Lastly, I have learned--thanks to my rather scatterbrained biology teacher--that three-day-old waakye ferments, so one's sobriety is best maintained by eating it fresh. The chef packs the meal in a pair of clean leaves that, according to my host mother, have notable medicinal qualities. I find it unlikely, though, that any such chemicals leeched into my lunch as it sat in the trappings for the five-minute walk from the stand to the house. Once extracted from its cocoon, the food is tasty, especially after a tiresome morning.
One of Thursday's momentous occasions was the consumption of a Ghanaian hot dog, or "sausage roll." Although Western-style sandwich bread is available, it is not used for buns and bakery items. Instead, a kind of yellow, dense, pastry dough is found on meat pies, hot dogs, etc. This dough is not sweet and does not have yeast; it is flaky and gets its color from margarine and egg, I believe. The meat of the hot dog was only three inches long, and the dough wrapped around it was of similar length. I found it quite tasty.
In the evening, I ate a sandwich for the first time in two months. Buying and preparing vegetables—tomatoes, cucumbers, and green peppers—was easy, but the meat was another story. This quest brought me to my first “cold store,” where the owner informed me that the smallest size of chicken flesh I could buy was half the animal; I’m glad I expressed interest in poultry, not beef! She proceeded to fetch the product from a freezer in a room that was blank, save for two such appliances. (From the other one, my host sister bought me a chocolate-covered ice cream popsicle, which was not nearly as tasty as it sounds.) Picking some shards of ice off of it, the woman barehandedly carried the frozen bird to a swatch of torn cardboard, where she hacked a hunk of fat off using a rusty cutlass that Priscilla assured me is usually saved for weeding. Having beheld such nonexistent sanitation measures, I was no longer sad that cooked meat is unavailable for purchase; I do not need food poisoning. Bringing our spoils home, I modeled the American method of slicing cucumbers, and then we set to work on the chicken. Using the machete and my hands, I removed the skin and as much fat as I could. After that, I tore small shards of flesh off the bones, which we proceeded to boil until thoroughly germless. Priscilla and my host father both seemed to enjoy the food, and I appreciated a lightweight dinner for once.
Tuesday afternoon I tried a new food, called “yooyi” (pronounced with the same vowels as “woody”). The snack is the seed pods from the yooyi tree, which reportedly comes up naturally in cornfields following the harvest. A brittle, dark skin surrounds the edible part. To eat, one cracks off the skin, gobbles the peach-colored flesh, and spits out the enclosed seed. Wikipedia tells me the tree’s scientific name is Dialium indum, and it is commonly called velvet tamarind.
Whether they realize it or not, Ghanaians depend enormously on buoyancy and dilution when putting on meals. Buoyancy is most important in food preparation. Before dry rice is shoveled into the pot, it is rinsed in a basin of fresh tap water, so the black grains of dirt in the package can float to the top and be skimmed off. This process is repeated once more after the rice has been dumped into the heated water. The dark particles’ buoyancy is responsible for the effectiveness of this method. Dilution, on the other hand, helps in washing dishes. The Ofoedas have running water, but both Grace and my host mother (and my host father, but he doesn’t wash dishes) were born in villages. As they were taught as children, the first step in meal clean-up is to haul buckets of water and dump them into basins. Thus, even rinsing is done in a container of standing water. It is true that plunging the first dish into the basin renders the water soapy, but it is trusted that the soap content is diluted enough that the water can be reused for the rest of the sudsy plates. That trust greatly reduces amount of water necessary.
In Ghana, meat and fish are much fresher than in America. Fish is today’s catch at the harbor, and my host mother does not buy meat of chickens for which she does not witness the slaughter. In fact, she executed (pun intended) the process herself last week with four of the driveway roosters because the other six had been stolen and there is only one failsafe way to keep chickens out of thieves’ possession. The meat was tougher and less plentiful than any I have encountered in the US, but it was satisfying to eat meat with so convincing a guarantee of authenticity. Fish is also good in its unadulterated state. Ghanaians eat fish bones, but I do not. Luckily, I have only once gotten a fish bone stuck in the back of my throat. Eating hunks of meat that were indiscriminately chopped off the rest of the animal has done wonders for my anatomy knowledge, too. Last week, for instance, I got the chance to examine the cartilage of a chicken wing. I hope that is not too gross for you; it’s actually pretty fascinating for me.
Today I think I may have gotten a decent estimation of a recipe for jolof rice. As a preface, I will say that no two people make jolof rice identically, so there is no way that a definite recipe can be written. Additionally, all measurements are complete guesses that I made while watching my host mother dump ingredients into the pot. Today’s meal was a mere two cups of dry rice because the jolof rice was only for me. She figures one cup per person, but I have never seen her prepare less than two cups at a time. This scaled-down version hopefully provided a more useful report for American cooks; after all, we make 1.5 cups in my house for three people. The cooking time was one hour, and the pot was on a bed of hot coals for that long. In the first ten minutes, she heated about ¼ cup of oil (more than necessary, in my opinion), fried/sautéed one chopped onion, dumped in three chopped tomatoes, added a teaspoon or two of ground hot pepper, and stirred in half a cup of tomato paste. After waiting five minutes, she put maybe three or four teaspoons of spices, 75g of canned mackerel, and a couple pinches of salt in. The spices are bought as a mixed concoction of rosemary, oregano, and other things. I recommend seasoning the sauce to your liking. Also, tuna flakes and corned beef can be a substitute for or complement to the mackerel, and whichever you use should be smashed with a spoon in the pot. At this point, the pot looks to have a merry tomato sauce, and I suspect heating a jar of tomato sauce could replace all of the above steps. The two cups of rice are dumped in ten minutes later, along with ample water (approximately 3-4 cups) and another teaspoon of salt. Stirring is necessary throughout to prevent burning. Cover the pot once the rice is in, and stuff a clean plastic bag under the lid once enough water boils off for the rice to be visible. The plastic bag, for which a dish towel can be substituted, ensures a seal and, in effect, steams the rice. This step is part of cooking plain rice, too. Regularly remove the insert and stir. The dish is finished when the rice is tender, or after about 35 minutes. I eat jolof rice with a ton (2:1 ratio, green to red) of fresh, shredded cabbage to make it slightly healthier and counterbalance the spiciness.
Tonight I assumed the role of head chef in the stew preparation (because my host mother was making her fufu). I used only a couple teaspoons of oil to sauté the chopped onions, of which there were maybe a little more than a cup. A teaspoon of ground spicy pepper later, I dumped in half a dozen small, chopped tomatoes. Next came a small can of mackerel in tomato sauce as well as a mixture of spices that smelled faintly like crab spice. I kept in on the fire until enough water had boiled off that it was hard to keep the tomato pulp from adhering to the pan. The stew is served with plain rice and cabbage. As you may have noticed the protocol mirrors that for jolof rice. Whether to eat rice & stew or jolof rice only needs to be decided after the stew is completed.