cooking

(written 842 am, at kitchen table with coffee, Yaounde, Cameroon)

(Hey, it’s the 30th! It’s Halloween tomorrow. I wonder whether there’s a Castro Halloween party in SF this year? They talked last year about cancelling it.)

But about the food -- we’ve probably been eating better here than at home. There’s loads of fresh fruits and vegetables available, and less processed food and meat. Plus we hardly ever go to restaurants, and we’re not familiar with any of them here yet. Ann K and Ray took us to a really good one, but the good ones are of course expensive, and we’re unemployed, or at least unpaid this year. We aren’t big on processed food anyway, but even the kind we do buy at home (thanks, Trader Joe‘s!) is unavailable here. And we have lots of time at night, since we don’t go out much, at least not yet, and we’re still spinning up at work.

So we cook, which we love to do together and only had time for once or twice a week back home. Christi and Jeff, for whom we’re housesitting, left a big suitcase of cookbooks here in the pantry. Most of them are in Dutch, presumably because Christi is Dutch. In spite of our ancestry, we don’t speak any. But a few are in English and, as luck would have it, a couple are ones we know and like. The books actually Mennonite, although we both got to know them back in Michigan before we ever met a Mennonite or joined their church. They are the More-with-Less Cookbook (“suggestions by Mennonites on how to eat better and consume less of the world‘s limited food resources“), and Extending the Table: A World Community Cookbook. Ann refers to them as missionary cookbooks, which is probably fair. They certainly have a social outlook, and are interspersed with quotes, introductions and stories about how we’re all in the same big boat. But, if you double or triple the seasonings (More-with-Less is from Midwest and the 70s), the food is hearty and tasty.

Both books, along with the newest one, which we have at home but not here, called Simply in Season, are connected with the Mennonite emphasis on voluntary simplicity, which is something that intrigues us, and part of why we now belong to a Mennonite church in San Francisco. There are a few more such books around the house; Ann is currently working on one called Living More Simply, which I plan to pick up when she’s done.

Back to the food. I won’t reproduce entire recipes here, since they’re great cookbooks and deserve to be purchased if you want to actually make any of this. But here’s what we’ve been making:

Two Meals For Four People From a Three-Pound Chicken (which, incidentally, costs about nine dollars US here, or 4500 CFCA): this is great. You boil up an entire cut-up chicken in a pot with bouillon, celery, onion, salt, pepper, cloves, peppercorns, a bay leaf, potatoes, carrots and greens. We threw in plenty of sautéed garlic too. This gets you four servings of excellent chicken stew. Then you bone what’s left of the chicken, reheat the broth, and add uncooked rice and more sautéed vegetables, for two more servings of chicken rice soup. It’s delicious.

Spaghetti sauce: I don’t think Ann used a recipe for this, although she did chat with Ann K about it. Tomato sauce, tomato paste (the secret, apparently), a few lackluster fresh tomatoes, and sautéed zucchini, onions and garlic, plus Italian seasoning mix found in the pantry (basil, oregano, parsley, rosemary, marjoram, etc). Made the day before to marinate, then simmered and served over rotini pasta.

Everyday Lentils and Rice (India): Sautéed onions, peppers, cloves, cinnamon, cardamom, rice and lentils, then simmered with potatoes, tomato, salt and (a substitution) carrots and green beans. You end up with lentil-rice stew. Mild but tasty. I’d double or triple the spices next time. And this one goes a long way; I think we got six servings out of it, or maybe more.

Middle Eastern Lentil Soup: lentils, cumin, garlic, onion, salt, pepper, and lemon juice. Basic and delicious.

Asha’s Ginger Tea: boiled chopped ginger, honey (substituted for sugar), tea (we tried it with chai once to), and milk. Wow. This came about because we get some help with our shopping, since we’ll get completely overcharged if we go to the market ourselves, and we ended up with four times the ginger we needed. So we hunted around for ginger recipes, and it turns out that a lot of the world (according to these cookbooks) makes beverages out of ginger or grains. This is really, really good. Our friend Jeff tipped us off once about ginger tea; he’s a motorcyclist, and on long rides he’ll take a thermos with him that he fills up with boiling water and chopped ginger before he leaves. He says it warms you right up.

Finally, here’s something I got yesterday from a coworker. We explained to him that we’re planning to try a recipe for peanut sauce, since peanuts (aka groundnuts) are plentiful here. He told us how to make a good Cameroon-style peanut sauce:

- Chop the head off a dried or smoked fish.
- Sautée in “huile rouge”, which is palm oil. (Apparently this stuff is not nearly as bad for you fresh as after processing, which is how it shows up in American snack foods as the dreaded “tropical oils.”)
- Add some garlic, onion, tomatoes, other vegetables as desired.
- Add water? There was mention here of water. Not sure how much, thanks to the state of my French.
- After this is cooked, add ground peanuts (i.e., natural peanut butter) and some water.
- Serve over rice.

Not sure if the rest of the fish goes in there too, and I just missed it in the instructions, but that seems reasonable. He mentioned too, I think, that this doesn’t look too attractive after it cooks, because the oil solidifies (“like snow”), but that it tastes really good.

If anyone tries this, let me know how it goes.