Fun With Food

Related to cooking, a few experiences with Malian food:

Foronto

Hot pepper.  Should NEVER be ingested by someone who can’t tolerate even medium salsa.  A tiny bit on the end of my fry and I had to chug my entire Nalgene and leave the CSCOM early that day since I ran out of water.

Chicken Spam

I tried to make chicken curry with chicken spam.  I managed to eat half, and gave the rest to the kids.  At 2am I threw it all up.  The next morning the chickens ate my puke.  Full circle.

Koró

Malians claim it isn’t a basa (lizard), but that’s exactly what this 3-foot monster is.  And apparently, this was a small one.  (But don’t worry, they aren’t mean!)  Alima came out of her house holding it by its tail, its throat slit.  With an expression of horrified fascination, I held it and touched its leathery skin and toenails.  And then she told me we were going to eat it.  My portion was one of the “arms.”  It wasn’t bad, except it was cooked with the skin on, which is thick and scaly, and the texture alone distracts you from the taste.  While picking small bones out of my mouth, I wondered if I was actually picking out toenails.

Waste

Food is not wasted in Mali.  Early on when Alima was living with me, I once threw semi-stale bread in my trash can.  Alima took my trash out and came back with the bread, wondering why on earth I had put it with the trash?  I tried to explain that the bread was bad, but in the end I just took it back and threw it down my ɲεgεn later when she wasn’t looking.  The next morning I found our leftover breakfast bread in the trash can, neatly wrapped in a plastic bag and waiting for the next meal.  Then I had to try to explain to Alima that the trash can does not double as bread storage.  Sigh.

Poop Nuts

A few months ago, the kids started collecting hard brown seed-things that they would crack open between two stones and then eat the nuts inside.  The nuts look a little like cashews and taste a little like walnuts.  I didn’t think much about them at the time, other than to eat them when offered.  Later, I found out from other PCVs that the seed-things actually pass through animals’ digestive systems, and the brown balls get pooped out.  And then the kids collect them and we eat the nuts inside.  Sure enough, a few weeks later when I learned how to crack the seeds myself (it’s actually quite a challenge!), my hands had a familiar and distasteful aroma…