Soul food

People have often asked me what kind of food I eat in Nigeria. I will offer you a little smorgasborg of photos. Be careful not to drool on your keyboards!!

Below are yams for sale at the Adoka market. These are a staple food in southern Nigeria. They are quite large, not like the yams you buy at Safeway. You can eat the yams fried on the fire, or "pounded". With the latter you peel them, boil them, then pound them in a large mortar with a pestle. It is pretty bland, but you eat it with a soup...


Above you see "pounded yam" on the left and a soup to accompany it on the right. You pick a piece of pounded yam off your ball, roll it in a small ball, make a divot with your thumb and dip it in the soup. This particular soup was served to us at a hospital we visited. I thought it was fish inside at first, then noticed the skin was a little too thick for that. I ate it anyway and it tasted like chicken. It was "bush lizard", which I later saw for sale at the market....

mmmmmmm..... lizards-on-a-stick or shishkabob-lizards.... whatever your pleasure:-)


Another soup is "draw soup" which can be made from various vegetables. This particular one is made from a bush/tree that has white stalks. It is also made from okra. It is not my favourite as it reminds me of secretions that I suck out of people's tracheostomies at work...

And then we have "bean cakes" (below) which are made from mashed up beans which are then rolled into a banana leaf and baked. Sometimes they put a boiled egg in the middle of it. To spice it up, they mix in salt and pepper and HOT red peppers which clean out my sinuses and make it look like I am weeping about how good my lunch is.




Leanne, Jenny & I nicknamed this snack (above) "peanut poo sticks" for obvious reasons. They are actually quite good. They are made from the left over peanut oil and residue and pressed into these stick formations. They are very hard and crunchy, and taste, well, like peanuts:-)

Speaking of another nut, did you know where cashews come from? Being a city girl, I thought they came out of the bulk bin at Safeway... but they grow on the top of this fruit. Perhaps there is an african name for this fruit, but we called it "cashew fruit" (geniuses i tell you...)
The fruit has kind of a smoky flavour, and I guess you can just pluck off the cashew and roast it.

The fruit in Nigeria (and every other developing country I have been too) is OUTSTANDING because it is fresh off the tree and not covered in pesticides. I love mangos and bananas and oranges and pineapples. I probably eat at least 10 servings of fruit a day while in Nigeria (where it is available). below is my somewhat pathetic attempt at creatively peeling a mango.



Nigerians can peel an orange top to bottom in one piece. Normally, they suck the juice out of the top and discard the rest of the orange. It is affectionately referred to as "sucking an orange"

My last week in Adoka, Nelvia and I learned how to bake without an oven. She brought dry brownie mix from Canada, we mixed it up with some eggs and oil and put it in this ingenious little oven. All you do is take a large pot, fill the bottom with about an inch of sand, put your smaller pot inside, cover it and put it on the stove. 30 minutes later we had delicious fresh brownies! It was a little piece of heaven:-)

That is just a little taste of what I have sampled of the wonderful African cuisine (i say wonderful with a mischevious smile).

(background music: corrine baily rae and moby)