Ghanaian Food Rant

I have been studying Twi and picking at my dinner for the past hour and I am over both of those things. My Twi is getting better, but it is still hard to communicate and understand what people are saying. It is a hard language to learn because it is tonal. I am sad to be back at homestay because now I have to eat the food my family prepares for me. Today I had lunch out in Koforidua so I enjoyed a mango and hard boiled egg (the fruit is amazing here and is cheap-oo) Ghanaians do not like fruit though, and they do not understand why we like fruit. I am okay with them not liking fruit I will happily eat it all for them. My family does not give me fruit often because they think its gross (strange huh?) so meals here usually consist of a hot stew (stew meaning oil with salt and tomato paste) a light stew is half oil half water but then they throw groundnut paste in too (peanut butter). The stew is served with mashed plantain (fufu) fermented mashed cassava and corn (banku) boiled plantain or boiled yam or mashed rice balls. I told my mom I don’t eat rice or bread (so they think I am crazy) but they give me plantain or other starchy veggies instead. I told my mom how much I love cabbage and  fresh vegetables (which are abundant here just not appetizing to them) and I ended up getting a cup of hot oil with cabbage overcooked in it J . Tonight I managed to pick out the meager vegies and drain a cup of oil out of my bowl before attempting to dig in. They smoke the fish here and it sits outside all day covered in flies. People here love it, I can eat it if it is served in stew and I didn’t see it on the street covered in flies. If I cook for myself I buy the frozen fish, or canned. It is hard to pick around all the bones though but otherwise it’s not bad. I don’t always look forward to a steaming bowl of oil and carbs after a hot long day. I cannot wait to live on my own and have salad time all the time. It is easy to find ingredients here to make tons of different dishes. Some volunteers on site visit talked of making brownies and fettuccini alfredo after scavenging the market and getting creative with powdered milk and laughing cow. For me I am excited to make cucumber salad, curry, mango avocado salsa, guacamole, and all foods that would absolutely horrify Ghanaians.

My counterpart invited me over for dinner and due to his experience with peace corps he knows that we cant eat cups full of oil and his wife sister Patience is an amazing chef, She makes the best fufu in Brekumanso and I actually thoroughly enjoyed eating it. The stew was more like a light tomato and onion stew with fish and a piece of gnarly cow fat (big delicacy here) that the kids excitedly fought over when I declined my piece. I stick to fish and chicken here. The actual beef of the cow is the same price as the fat chuncks, most people but just straight cow fat and call it beef.

Anyways, my favorite Ghanaian food I can eat without major modification or feeling like s*** after is beans and gari. They cook white beans (watch out for the rocks though!) and top it with a spicy tomato/pepe sauce. Then the sprinkle gari (ground dried cassva? I think) it is a white flacky kinda crunchy crumbs. Then for extra you can add an egg or fried coco (ripe plantain very gooey and sweet). Then sorry Ghanaians… I go find a waekye or noodle lady with cabbage and have her top off my sack with chopped cabbage. I then mix together my wonderful concoction of white beans, gari, ripe plantain, spicy sauce, cabbage, and a hard boiled egg and bite a hole in the bag and slowly suck down my lunch. It tasted like the inside of a burrito!

For those of you unfamiliar with Ghanaian street food everything is served in plastic baggies. If you get waekye they fill a bag with beans and rice and other choice toppings then tie it up, you then mix it and make a hole in the corner of the bag to squeeze it out. Here when you buy water it comes in a sachet…same concept…. Bite a hole and drink the water. Surprisingly they balance pretty well without spilling on tables and tros. I guess it is like those freez-e pops except instead its square and full of piping hot porridge or peanut butter to make groundnut soup for dinner later.

I think Ghanain food really is good though, most people love Waekye I just don’t eat rice. I like groundnut soup and fufu its basically drinking spicy peanut butter. But when I do eat it I feel very ill after due to the fact I just drank oil and peanut butter ( and the amount that makes me sick is a few bites…Ghanaian can eat bowls of it!). A lot of the food really would taste great if they just cut back on the oil, so I will be cooking traditional foods and immersing myself in the culture but just tweaking the recipes a little so I don’t gain 30 pounds or have a heart attack. I ate lizard meat on a stick the other day it was covered in pepe and onions and tasted like greasy delicious chicken. One piece of lizard meat had a strange consistency though and after examination it looked to be just a hunk of rubbery tail ( I deemed it not edible) but the rest was tasty. I heard cat is very very tasty from a volunteer who was served it the other night.

Well that is my rant on food for the day. I am excited to get to site and experiment with all the ingredients the Ghanaian markets have to offer. I also enjoy eating all the different street foods here, although most are not paleo there are still a lot of gluten free options. During my shadow visit to Tweapease I lived of kwadu (little bananas), ground nuts, and hard boiled eggs which was pretty cheap and filling. People actually just gave us bags of bananas and plantain to eat because they know we like fruit and that’s all they had in the village and what grows in abundance. I learned during this time that if I lived off of bananas I would eat for less than 50 cents a day and never have to cook, but then I also learned that bananas are a good treatment for diarrhea….so lets just say I didn’t have to go in a latrine for a week after my banana bender.

Drinking here is interesting too, beer is expensive 2.50 ghana cedi ($1.25)per a big bottle ( the beers are the size of a rogue or  the big micro brews) and they all kinda taste the same and there are only a few options. Liquor sachets are 30p (15 cents) each…. They come in varieties of gin, whiskey, and other strange uknown flavors and types. You can mix them with Fanta or avaro because they taste like unfiltered s**** and probably take years off of your life. The wine comes in large juice boxes and also tastes like s*** but they are fun to stick a straw in and be like “hey I have a big alcoholic juice box, look how small my hands look!”. The sangria on the other hand tastes like kool-aid with 3 extra cups of sugar. We have learned to water it down then add goal (a better of the liquor sachet options) to make an enjoyable beverage. There are shops that sell what look like wine and liquor in actual bottles (more legit than the plastic 15 cent packets) but I haven’t looked into pricing or what is available. Our group likes to stop by or meet at “the spot” (what bars are called in Ghana) and have a beer after a long day of training if we can afford it. It is really fun to see the locals at the spot when they are all dressed up in there finest clothes, fresh haircuts, and sunglasses at night. All the barber shops here has pictures of Ludacris, Obama, and Chris Brown outside them and say “God’s Grace Barbering” or “Not My Power Salon” or “Halleluiah Barber spot”

 In my village of Brekumanso where I will be living there is a spot but I haven’t checked it out yet I was told that in my village they drink appeteshi, people cant afford beer so they go into the spot take a shot of appeteshi and leave. Appeteshi is palm wine that his been fermenting all day…or longer. In the morning they make palm wine from the trunks of palm trees which is a sweet and kinds spicy drink barely alcoholic that I have not yet sampled. Appeteshi is after the wine has become much much stronger and is basically a strong spicy liquor. Lots of Ghanaians don’t drink, some drink occasionally, and some drink palm wine all morning and the rest of the day. When there is a funeral and lots of people in town and music is blasting it is hard to tell when a random stranger comes up to you and starts talking very dramatically if they are just a normal Ghanain interested in the Obronis, drunk, or mentally ill. It is hard because maybe they are your Uncle from the town nextdoor wanting to meet you and it would be extremely rude for you not to greet them proper. Or they could be your DRUNcle and they won’t remember if you greet them or not but they will tell you really lame story or joke that makes no sense for the next hour without letting go of your hand. Or they could be a crazy person who will not leave you alone and follow you for the next hour if you greet them. A lot of people have issues where they teach at a school with an alcoholic teacher who comes in drunk everyday. They never get fired but if you are lucky they will transfer them to another school to deal with (yeah…I wont even go into this…its mind blowing).

So that is barely a TASTE of my Ghanaian experiences…. Wow the Ghanaian sense of humor would make one very long and interesting blog post I will have to do that someday.

 Cheers

Emily