On Food

One of my goals here has been to examine food and agriculture systems here. Also, I know many of you are interested in what I'm eating.

I'm a bit obsessed with local agriculture, and going to the farmer's market every week in the summer, etc. in the U.S. One aspect of note here is that all agriculture is local. You have to buy all fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, chickens at any of the various markets interspersed throughout the city. Yaoundé has many trees and greenery throughout the city, so often a bunch of plantains or a deliciously ripe papaya will have come from within the city. There are western-style supermarkets for packaged products (and cheese and butter, which don't exist otherwise), but for general meal-cooking purposes all shopping is done at the markets. So, for the most part food is fresh. 

I will say that I do not eat many fruits and vegetables here. Occasionally there will be a salad with a meal (generally consisting of carrots, and maybe some tomatoes or avocado), and some sauces have tomatoes or are made of crushed leaves of manioc, for example. And fruit, though prolific, is often just for special occasions. However, I have definitely been enjoying the super flavorful pineapple, papaya, bananas (5 cents each), oranges... the list goes on. 

I've been trying to learn how to cook certain foods here - often in mass quantity with my family because there are so many children. Here is a picture of us stripping leaves to be ground up:

 

Making fufu, or cous-cous (not the same as Western cous-cous), using plantain leaves and the red palm oil. At the market, you can buy big bags of the ground root used to make cous-cous, it looks at little like cement mix.

The grinding process: Typical mortar and pestle (although very large). All of this is done outside behind the house, next to where the fire is. 

I did succeed in finally getting around to making cookies with my sisters recently! I felt skilled because we made them in a fire (no oven!), although it ended up as one cookie (the second batch purposely) and was rather complicated, so I'm not sure if we'll do it again. We made crepes the next day with the rest of the ingredients. Yum!

Francesca was pretty excited abou the cookies

"Oven"

Most main dishes here have some form of fish, chicken, beans (or other legumes, possibly ground up and mixed with corn), or (rarely) meat, accompanied with rice or plantains. I think I've already mentioned my love for beignets-haricots, fried dough served with beans. It is delicious. I admit to not being a huge fan of sauce arachids, peanut sauce, most often with poisson fumé (which tends to be a little dry...) on rice. It's interesting, my taste buds have had to adjust to flavors here. I find that Americans are used to many international flavors, there are always Mexican or Thai or Mediterranean restaurants.  However, most African flavors are completely foreign - every once one could find an Ethiopean restaurant, but that's about it.

Sometimes when I miss American food I take a brief respite from French and read NPR's food blog, The Salt, which is great. Although, it doesn't really help the problem of my missing cooking with cheese and the like.

I have lots more to say on the subject of food (what a surprise), but I'll leave it for now. Off to the beach tomorrow! Have an awesome Thanksgiving! I am sad to miss it (a holiday dedicated solely to food and company, what could be better?).