Home Cookin'

Last week at the market, I asked our lovely house help Julia to help me buy some greens so that she could teach me how to cook them. There are all sorts of greens used in Cameroon, many of them very bitter. (One called ndole, for example, has to be washed numerous times, at least once with limestone, to remove some of the bitter taste.) I wanted a type that can simply be cooked and seasoned, so we bought two huge bunches of a variety simply called ‘greens’ by Anglophones, and ‘folon’ (not sure of the spelling) by Francophones. It sure looked like a huge pile of greens, the bundles tied up with dried grass, and so big that we had to buy a new market sack to carry them in. Fortunately there were lots of boys swarming around and ready to sell us a sack, along with all those swarming around in hopes of carrying our already-full sacks for us in their wheelbarrows.

The next day we prepared the greens, along with some fish we had purchased. Here are the greens and the fish before we set to work.

Lots of garlic and ginger, an onion and some tomatoes later (as well as a few of the MSG/bouillon flavor cubes that seem to be omnipresent in African cuisine), the greens were cooked down into a small but very tasty shadow of their former selves. And the fish (honestly I wasn’t any help with all the scaling and gutting and slicing off of fins – Julia did every bit of that!) were fried to perfection.

Looks quite different, non? And it was delicious. We had a few friends over later that evening and made a fine meal of fish and greens and boiled potatoes. Now that’s what I call some gooood home cookin’!