Food...

Food…
I’ve decided to add a daily meal log from the weekend, since it was full of new culinary sensations, including some delightful taste sensations...
Day 1: We arrived in time for dinner, which was really good…rice with sauce and then chicken with huge pieces of garlic. I’m drinking way too much fanta here, but since the water isn’t always reliable, it’s become my new best friend by default.
Day 2:
Breakfast: a café au lait and bread with butter. But, café au lait here is quite different from our version of it, of which I have made far too many at Bridgehead. It’s a bowl with a blob of condensed milk, into which you pour boiling water. If you want, you can add Nescafe, but it’s not necessary. It was quite gross, in a really unhealthy kind of way, but quite tasty. And the bread with butter…think an entire baguette smothered in margarine. Yaiss…I can definitely see where those 20 pounds come in. It was a bit sad because as we were eating, children kept coming in and trying to sell us things. They all sell these little packs of Kleenex, since most Burkinabé seem to carry them around with them to wipe their hands and such. One woman took out her wallet to get some money to buy one, and kids who were hanging around the door saw her from across the restaurant and raced to be the first to offer her the Kleenex to buy. Also, when we got up to leave, little kids rushed to the table to pick anything we hadn’t eaten. If I had known I wouldn’t have forced myself to eat as much.
Lunch: another baguette (I protested, I swear, but they made me eat it!) and a can of sardines in oil. It hit the spot, after hiking among old ruins for hours under the sun, but I have a feeling my body isn’t too happy with me.
Dinner: we had something called foutou, a Burkinabé specialty. It’s made from yams, boiled and then ground to a pulp, until it becomes white and almost like a dumpling. It’s made into a long ball, and then you put it into your plate, pour sauce into it, and then eat it with your hands. It’s really good, but very filling.
Day 3:
Breakfast: same as day 1
Lunch: the Burkinabé version of ragout, which was yams in a tomato-y sauce with some meat, eaten with rice. Quite delish, but it only added to the high starch concentration of the weekend.
Ah! I forgot to mention the mid morning snack! Everyday between breakfast and lunch, a big plate of goat meat would arrive, with onions and hot pepper (which is really hot here). It comes in a bowl with toothpicks, and everyone sits around the table and eats with the toothpicks. It was really tasty, but the butcher was right outside our house, and I saw the goat in every stage of its demise, so it was a little bit hard to eat it. Ehe...

A la prochaine!