Cookin'

When I came downstairs for my evening "sitting with the host family" time Miss was making dinner so I walked towards the kitchen. As I got near she said, "if you come in here I'm going to put you to work!" and I gladly accepted her offer. I grew up cooking and food always strong social glue so I am always happy to help cook here.

Miss was making salad and sauce for dinner so, while she was preparing the sauce I cleaned the lettuce. Preparing lettuce Senegalese style involves removing the leafy part from the more stem part of a piece of lettuce (for some reason they don't like the good crunchy part), soaking the leafy part in bleach and water, then drying it off. After finishing with the lettuce I "marinated" the tomatoes and cucumbers aka covered them in vinaigrette. Miss had boiled potatoes (to be part of the sauce) and took those off to cool. She put the sauce in the pot (Senegalese people refer to all sauce as "sauce" no matter what's in it... usually, like tonight, it's beef bullion/MSG cube, salt, oil, onions, garlic) to cook while I cut the boiled potatoes into bite sized cubes. The potatoes were added to the sauce and that was left to sit.

We eat dinner at 8:30pm pretty much on the dot and, because the meal was ready before, we sat around waiting. The kids did their homework and the rest of us sat around listening to Khady jabber. Close to 8:30pm Miss plated (tossed the lettuce in the vinaigrette, placed it around the edge of the plate, put cucumber and tomatoes on top of it, then placed the sauce in the middle of the plate). At 8:30pm we all sat down on the mat, got our pieces of bread, and dug in.

From now on just know that I'm going to use Miss' rule when it comes to cooking: if you come in this kitchen - you're going to help!


Cheers,
KO

Dinner's On Me

My house is about half full right now so we've been having a lot of food left over after lunch each day. Because I know there's food that could be simply reheated, I decided to cook dinner for everyone! I wasn't sure if anyone was going to like it (though I knew they would pretend) but the leftovers were a fall back in case they hated my food.

I had been thinking about cooking dinner for a while and I was going to attempt a macaroni noodle with Laughing Cow (or Vache Qui Rit if you're in a Francophone country) cheese sauce that other volunteers had made...then we had spaghetti for dinner last night. Not wanting to bore my host family I decided on a peanut sauce stir fry mix vegetable pile with lettuce around the edges (usually my host family eats cooked mixed vegetables with onions sauce and lettuce around the edges so this was my Asian/American take on that). This morning I went to the market and bought: lettuce, green beans, green peppers, onions, garlic, carrots, peanut butter (which is really just mashed up peanuts with no salt or sugar), and limes.

After lunch I cut the green beans, cleaned the lettuce, then bleached all of the vegetables. (Side note: that might sound like a bad idea but it's to kill any parasites or amoebas living on the vegetables so eating minimal quantities of bleach is better than eating those.) Around 7pm I realized that I hadn't bought bread yet so I ran out to get that, most Senegalese cooking involves the rule of: if there's not rice there's bread. After the soap opera I boiled the green beans and carrots while cutting the peppers, onions, and garlic. The garlic, onions, and peppers were then sauteed, the green beans and carrots were added, and then they were taken off. I only have one pot so they were moved to a plate while I put the peanut butter with some water, to thin the sauce, soy sauce (bought in a bottle in Thies but you can buy it in packets in most boutiques), lime juice, some sugar, some salt, and some Chinese hot pepper sauce that my parents sent me. After lots of whipping it was ready so I threw the vegetables in and tossed the mixture.

That was put in the center of a plate, lettuce was put around the edges, and the bread was cut for everyone. Miss helped me get the mat down, water bottles out, and forks ready then we ate! I thought the meal was pretty good, not the best thing I've cooked but not bad by any means. One of my host sisters didn't really like it but pretended she did. Another seemed to really like it - or is just really good at pretending. I couldn't tell if Miss liked it or not but then later she asked if she could save some for tomorrow so I guess she did... and that's everyone in my house right now (except for my host mom but she's been eating yogurt and millet every night).

So overall I think it was a success and I'm glad I finally cooked for them. It doesn't look too appetizing but here's a photo: