Fast Food

Post by Lara

24 October 2012

In American culture, the term “fast food” often has a negative connotation—bringing to mind calorie-packed meals high in carbohydrates and fats kept hot under a lamp with a way-too-big sugary drink on the side, and a toy for anyone 12 and under. Restaurants seem to want to try to brand themselves as something outside of the “fast food” umbrella, but at the same time Americans are notorious for wanting things now, if not an hour ago. It’s an interesting set-up. We want food ready now, but we don’t want to think of it as “fast food” and we would prefer if it were made after we ordered it, rather than sitting under a heat lamp until we came and asked for it. 

Needless to say, Salone’s version of “fast food” is a bit different.  We’ve never seen a McDonald’s or KFC here, although there is a random Big Mac advertisement hanging on a fence in Bo that we used to walk past during training.  “Fast food,” or food that is pre-made and ready for you to pay for it and enjoy, comes in two varieties: “street food” and “cookeries”. 

“Street food” is always something you can eat while you walk (or ride in an over-crowded vehicle), and it comes in many varieties: donuts, fried meat pies, fried bean sandwiches, roasted peanuts, boiled peanuts, roasted corn, shortbread cookies, and the list goes on.  It seems that at least by city, each item has a price and it doesn’t matter who’s selling it. Coconut cakes are always Le 500 in Bo.  Boiled peanuts come in 3 different sizes for Le 200, Le 500, and Le 1000 in both Bo and our town.  Fried bean sandwiches are Le 1000 in Bo and at our site. Kevin has one for lunch every day. In general, street food is delicious and affordable- though we’ve been advised more than a few times to be wary of any vendors who don’t practice good hygiene, since food-borne illnesses are common here. 

Still, we tend to eat street food almost every day. When boiled peanuts are plentiful, we enjoy buying a bag of them and snacking on them while we cook dinner.  Right now, we tend to eat more roasted peanuts and donuts than anything else. Soon, though, more produce will be in season and the street food options will grow. 

“Cookeries” (or kukri, in Krio) are sometimes run as restaurants and sometimes are toted around town.  Every school has several cookery women who sell lunch daily (we Peace Corps volunteers refer to them as “lunch ladies,” but I don’t know if anyone else calls them that).  Most towns also have a house or two that sell cookery regularly, and in our town there is a bar that sells cold (and I mean ice cold) beverages and usually has a cookery option as well.  The options for cookery are usually cassva root or fufu or rice with a sauce to go on top. Cassava root is a starchy tuber that is boiled and then patted into a ball. The cookery women usually have two different size balls that they sell for Le 500 and Le 1000.  Cassava root is served with any number of sauces. I personally enjoy it with granat sup [peanut soup- a peppery sauce made with fish and ground peanuts] and binch [beans, pepper, and palm oil boiled into a thick sauce]. Fufu is fermented cassava root—kind of sour and fairly sticky, rolled into a ball (for the same price as the cassava root) and often served with granat sup. Rice can be served with anything, including the sauces mentioned above and plassas [green leaf sauces that usually have fish or chicken and always have a ton of pepper and palm oil].  Cookery meals are served where you order them and come with a glass of water (I provide my own filtered water). 

Culturally, it’s normal to share a plate and even to eat with one’s hands [not our favorite thing, but we’ve done it].  Often a teacher at my school will offer to share his or her food with me or will buy me my own bowl a few times each week.  It’s considered rude to turn down food, though you are not expected to finish your plate (someone will always finish it- so no one is offended when some food is leftover for them).

One nice thing about living in a tropical climate is that you don’t need heat lamps to keep food warm- donuts, bean sandwiches, and other snacks are carried around in clear plastic buckets with lids, so the sun keeps them nice and warm all day. The cookery meals are usually carried in big plastic containers that keep the heat in just fine.  That being said, we don’t usually have the option of having something made after we order it—many of the vendors wake up incredibly early to make their chop [food], and then spend the rest of the day selling what they made that morning.  As far as calories and nutrition, some options are very healthy, like boiled peanuts with very little salt or vitamin-rich cassava leaf sauce. At the same time, some options are just carbs and sugar. We don’t tend to feel bad about indulging though, since we are burning way more calories just going about our daily lives here than we did in a typical day in Ohio.  It may not be the Golden Arches or a Fourth Meal, but the “fast food” that Salone offers definitely keeps us happy in between meals that take at least an hour to prepare every time.   

Things We Have

Post by Lara

21 October 2012

Things that we had in Ohio that we don’t have in Salone:

•  A refrigerator and freezer that held about a month’s supply of food
• Potable running water and a water heater
• 5 ice cream shops within walking distance (about ½ mile radius) from our house
• High-speed internet in our house and wi-fi in many public places
•  An electric kettle that boiled water in about a minute
• A car. Also on this point, roads that allowed us to drive about 60 miles in about an hour. That same distance takes 2-28 hours here, depending on how rugged your car is and what condition the roads are in (and whether you have to stay at a friend’s house overnight waiting for a replacement vehicle to come).
• Air conditioning. Oddly, we don’t miss this nearly as much as we expected we might.
• Family and friends in the same time zone (Pat- we’re glad to have you still!) and cell phone plans that allowed us to text and talk to many of them for free.

Kevin's family (March 2012)

Lara's Family (May 2012)

Things that we have in Salone that we didn’t have in Ohio:

• A clothesline—always meant to put one up but never did (we had some burnt-out Christmas lights that we hung our hand-washed things on though)
•  Neighbors who bring us food every day and help us finish household chores
• Tropical fruit galore- guava is one of the best things I’ve ever tasted, and everyone here raves about mango season. All those things arrive in Ohio under-ripe and are never quite as flavorful there as they are in their native environment.
• The. Best. Bananas. I. Have. Ever. Tasted. [Also- at least 4 varieties. Yes, bananas come in different forms. They’re all delicious]
• Tailors who will sew an outfit specifically for us [on a foot-pedal sewing machine, by the way] for less than it usually costs to buy an outfit from a secondhand clothes shop here.  My last outfit- skirt, top, and head wrap, cost less than $15, fabric and workmanship combined.
• Time—Time to read the books we never read, to paint our house, to brush the leaves from our yard almost every day, to make our own candles out of wax drippings, to prepare lessons several weeks in advance, etc.

Lara, Papa KJ, Mama Gilo, and Kevin (August 2012)

Lara with the kids next door (October 2012)

A De Go Bay-Bay (I’m Going Shopping)

Post by Lara

October 17, 2012

Thursday is market day here in our town, which means that vendors travel from all the neighboring villages as well as the other towns and cities within a day’s travel, converging on our market which overlooks the river and goes all the way down to the riverbank.  The market has a number of sellers who are there daily, but Thursday is a whole other animal- personal space is nowhere to be found, and you have to learn to be assertive in order to get anywhere, all while carrying on broken conversations in Mende and Krio.  Beyond that, Kevin and I happen to be 2 of about 5 Americans who have frequented our town in the past 10 years, so we’re fairly recognizable and we’re expected to greet all of our friends and ask how they are doing.  Also, if either of us ever goes anywhere without the other, we spend about 50% of our time explaining where our spouse is [and/or explaining that no, that is not my brother. He’s my husband. Yes, husband. Yes, I know you think we look alike. No, we don’t have any children…etc.] 

Needless to say, Thursday is a busy, crazy, hectic day, but I still look forward to it every week. It may be the only day of the week that I can buy a coconut or some cherry tomatoes, or that the man from across the river comes selling his delicious “machine bread” (not sure what machine they use- I’ll let ya’all know if I find out), or that I can buy two yards of fabric to have window curtains made for our wash room.  Kevin is usually teaching until 2 on Thursday, but I have just one morning class and then I’m done for the day, so I generally head down to the market around midday to see what’s being offered.  This is also serendipitous because Kevin hates crowds, and I tolerate them. Thus, Gbessay goes to the market each Thursday.  Below is a photo of one especially awesome market day:

On this particular Thursday, I was able to score two dried lobsters for Le 2000 (that’s about 50 cents, my friends. And that was for the pair—though you may notice they’re missing their claws), a handful of dried shrimp, some okra, 15 limes, 3 “plums” (don’t ask me what they are. They’re delicious, but they’re not the same fruit we call plums in the states), a coconut, and a large hunk of pumpkin. I believe the total bill on this particular day was about Le 30,000 ($6.81).  We made gumbo with the okra, lobster, and shrimp and served it with rice and “machine bread” [see photo below and be jealous!], and then made fried pumpkin pies and pumpkin bars for dessert.   The one trouble with market day in Salone is that much of the food you buy has to be cooked and eaten within a day or two, so we tend to eat a lot of fresh things on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and by Tuesday or so we’re eating a lot more dry goods.  For instance, tonight, Wednesday, we made fried rice and sweet and sour sauce- the only produce needed were two cloves of garlic, two onions, and some hot pepper. 

That’s market day, in a nutshell. Someday I might venture to the market with my camera and snap a quick photo of the stalls, but so far not a whole lot of people in town are aware that I own a camera and I’m ok with that.  If I have any more awesome market days in the future I’ll post another photo so you can see!

Gbessay Sabi Kuk! #2: Pierogies and Banana Sauce

 Post by Lara

10 October 2012

The fun thing about living in a completely new climate is that we have to adapt to a new annual cycle, including learning all over again what time of the year is the “season” for certain fruits and vegetables.  The end of rainy season, which is roughly September through October, is also called the “hunger season,” because rice won’t be harvested until a few weeks into the dry season, and many types of produce are out of season right now.  The one thing that seems to be around in abundance is bananas, and we gobble them up like it’s our job. We were lucky enough to be placed at a site where bananas are grown, so we pay as little as ¼ the price we would pay in Bo or Freetown for a bunch of bananas.  Because of this, we do a lot of cooking with bananas and experimenting with them to see what kinds of new things we can come up with.  Last week when we were making pierogies and discussing how sad it was that we didn’t have applesauce or sour cream to put on top, Kevin decided to throw together an odd combination of spices and mashed banana to make something that would stand in for the applesauce. It turned out totally delicious, so we wanted to share the recipe with ya’all:

Latitude 7 Pierogies with Banana-Thyme Sauce

The dough:

2 eggs

2 TBSP oil

½ cup of water

2-2 ½ cups of flour

Pinch'o'salt

The filling:

2 lbs Irish potatoes

2-4 cloves of garlic (pre-sautéed)

2-3 onions (also pre-sautéed)

Salt, pepper, hot pepper, and Maggi to taste [We only used salt and black pepper]

3 TBSP margarine

Banana-Thyme Sauce

1-2 very ripe bananas

2 TBSP water

Juice from ½ lime or lemon

2 pinches of salt

2 tsp thyme

Assemble dough ingredients, wet ones first and then the dry ones. Knead into a ball adding flour if needed to get a smooth but slightly sticky dough, then divide dough into ping-pong size balls. Let sit 30 minutes.

Boil potatoes until soft. Drain water (if you want, save the water and add until you have about 4 inches to boil the pierogies in) and mash potatoes. Mash in margarine, garlic, onions, and spices.

One at a time, roll a ball of dough out into a circle as flat as you can get it.  Place a scoop of potato mixture onto the circle and fold the circle over into a half-circle, pinching the edges closed. Seal the edge by pressing the tongs of a fork over it. Drop 4- 6 pierogies at a time into a pot of salted boiling water. When they rise to the surface, they're done. Remove, and put in your next batch. As you’re cooking, put the finished pierogies in a container with a little water or oil to keep them from sticking to each other.

When the pierogies are finished mash the bananas with water, lime juice, salt, and thyme in a frying pan or small pot. Heat until warm, and serve on top of pierogies. Pierogies are also delicious served with applesauce, sour cream, or soy sauce. 

A banana tree in our host family's back yard