Snack Time

Food, man. Food.

It’s finally game time for this blog post, buckle in fans, it is going to be a long one. You’re going to get a list here, people.

People always seem to ask “whats your favourite food/what do you like to eat”. Are you kidding me? Take me to an all you can eat and I’ll kick your butt any day of the week. India Gate can just sense it when I am on my way there.

Food was literally my #1 fear coming into this. Now, I know this sounds silly, but I love food, and I am always concerned that someone around me is hungry and trying to be polite and not saying anything. Meaning even in my dorm room there was always lots of food to bring or to offer people.

Before I came here I was reading about the Nigerian militants that abducted a French family from the North of Cameroon, thinking “but what will I eat”.  Such a thing in my life.

Now, let’s talk about Cameroonian food.

I am into my 3^rd month now so I am starting to get a pretty good handle on the food here. There are some things that I love, but some I am not too hot on, let’s just be honest. Think I’m being picky? Probably, but when was the last time you ate at a Cameroonian restaurant? What about the last time you SAW a Cameroonian restaurant? Yeah, I thought so. Let me give you a brief breakdown of food, please excuse any spelling errors, I am spelling everything phonetically.

Top 20 Most Popular Cameroonian Food Items (in my life)!

1. Achoo – The traditional meal for the North West Region. Consists of pounding coco yams and bananas and a few other things into a thick paste. Then you make a bowl/ring on your plate of the paste and add the soup into the bowl/ring. The soup consists of a few spices and things, but the main ingredients are red palm oil and large chunks of cow. You then scoop this soup up with a finger full of the paste and eat it. The texture when properly combined is similar as to what the name would suggest.

2. Jama-jama/fried vegetables/ huckleberry – It is little plant leaves wilted and then fried with oil, tomato and onion. Usually served with boiled yam or plantain, or fou-fou.

3. Fou-Fou – Now there are 2 kinds of fou-fou, water fou-fou made with… something, coco yam maybe, and fou-fou corn, made with, you guessed it, corn. I don’t know how to describe this other than a lump. It is kindof like bread dough, it a little ball, but much, much denser and white. You pull off a lump and use it to help scoop up whatever you are eating it with. Not much of a taste, so no major complaints of my part.

4. Enkwong (Eh-kwon) – This our coworker showed us how to make and it was super delicious. It is usually served with crayfish, but we omitted that and I was a really big fan of the end result. You grate coco yams, on something like a cheese grater and it becomes a paste, like paper mache paste, and then you add some spices and roll the paste into little springroll-esque things in coco yam leaves. Once you have a pot full of little coco yam springrolls you cook them and add a pile of spices and palm oil and it is like spicy deliciousness. Big fan of this one, but it is very labour intensive to make.

5. Blackened/ Burned Corn – Just corn that you toss by a fire and keep turning it until it is all ‘cooked’ or black. Then you don’t bite into it, you pick the little kernels off and pop them in your mouth like jelly beans. It is actually really good, and really fun to pick the little kernels off. It is also really easy to share with little fingers or animals that may be wandering too, which is nice. This I ate a lot of this in the village, but you can buy it on the street side in the city, as well as plums cooked in the same way.

6. Jerome Rice – Basically rice just spiced with Maggi and a pile of veggies. Really good if fish hasn’t been added. (Author’s Note: unsure of the name, I have heard this alled a few different things, but this is what I think I heard the family in Santa saying)

7. Smashed Irish – Potatoes here are called ‘Irish potatoes’, so when you want a few more fries with your meal, you don’t ask for more fries, you ask for more fried Irish. Basically, this one is just mashed potatoes sans garlic and butter, plus black beans. Not bad. I also like the name because it makes me think of leprechaun stumbling through a clover field after a little too much enjoyment.

8. Spaghetti Omelets – Spaghetti cooked and then beaten with the eggs (and usually onion and tomato) then fried. So you’re eating an omelet with pasta in it. I know this sounds weird, but I promise when there are no breakfast sandwiches to be had, this thing really takes the edge off. It would probably be weird without Maggi (which can be found later in this post) but with it is just glorious. Omelets overall are very popular, my absolute go to.

9. Ndole – I don’t even know what this is exactly but I don’t like it. It is boiled peanuts, ground with leaves. It is fishy and served with fou-fou corn or boiled yams and I want nothing to do with it. Everyone except me really likes it, so it must be a texture thing for me. Clearly my favourite dish.

10. Ground Nut Soup – Nji’s mom’s Ground Nut soup changed my life. Actually. Ground Nut = Peanut. So it is a spicy peanut soup, but it isn’t a ‘soup’ persay. It is more like a sauce that you add to rice. It is so good, and if I come home only being able to make 1 Cameroonian dish, I want it to be this.

11. Pepper Soup – Several variations dependent on the meat, but the pepper soup is always the same (goat meat is popular). Kindof like a thinner spicy gravy. Really good if it isn’t too runny/oily.  Again, Nji’s mom makes the best version I have tried. (Author’s Note: Nji’s mom is a really really good cook, and sends food to the house often. Like a Cameroonian version of the East Indian neighbours I had growing up, always sending over the most delicious food that you could never replicate yourself properly, but enjoy eating very much)

12. Fried Plantains – If the plantains are cooked all the way through and nice and crispy, hook me with a vat. Just sliced plantains deep fried like French fries. And they make everything better.

13. Fish and Bubbalo – I would be doing my beloved roommate a dishonor if I did not mention fish and bubbalo. It is an entire fish (I don’t know the kind, when you ask the response is either “fresh” or “smoked”) cooked on a grid over coals. You are served an entire fish and you just pick the meat off with your fingers. With it comes bubbalo, which is basically soaked coco yams, pressed through cheesecloth, then the juice makes something that looks and tastes like a very large, 1/2” diameter Korean noodle cut into 1 1/2” segments.

14. Beans and Puff Puffs – There is a lady that makes them on the end of our street weekday evenings, so when I am too lazy to cook, we get takeout of beans and puff puffs. And 600 CFA later ($1.20 CDN), we have a meal big enough to feed 3 with leftovers. Beans, just black beans usually, cooked in some sort of delicious oily sauce. Puff Puffs are really light fluffy deep fried spheres of dough. Crispy on the outside, airy on the inside. They are about the size of a big timbit. You eat them with beans, and with pepper, but as of late I want to roll them in cinnamon sugar and pretend it is a timbit. So delicious. I love puff puffs, and at 25 CFA ($0.05 CDN) a pop it is a vice my stipend funds. If I really am what I eat, I would like to thank you, Canadian tax payer, for turning me into a puff puff.

15. Pig Ears – Ok, let’s be honest, this one isn’t popular, but they did try to serve us pig ears at a cry die we went to. They would very proud to be offering this to us so we couldn’t say no. We then regifted them to the people behind us and they were thrilled.

16. White Beans – Literally, just white beans cooked in the same oily deliciousness. Usually served with fried Irish, fried plantain, or rice. A chop shop favourite; a restaurant we go to has no name, or at least we don’t know the name, but they make really great white beans, so we affectionately call it the ‘white bean place’.

17. Chicken and Stew –Chicken normally means a quarter chicken, how it is cooked depends on where you go. Stew is basically a runny tomato paste with spice that you can put on rice. Quite good as a matter of fact if it has a good spice to tomato ratio.

18. Beer – Not food, but no meal is complete without a Castel, Export, or in my case, usually a Booster.

19. Smoked Fish – This really brings stuff to a whole new level. You can buy these creepy critters anywhere. They are sold at both food, and main market, and along the street. It is a black fish, like burned, it looks like charcoal. It smells like the bubble in the harbour popped and enveloped and exploded everything in the Atlantic with it. They are in a circle; they are cooked, and presented so the mouth of the fish is biting the tail of the fish. I don’t even know what the word self-cannibalism is, but these fish are certainly embracing it. I would also like to say that I have never seen anyone ever purchase or eat one of these, so I don’t know what is going on with them.

20. Koki – There are 2 kinds of koki, corn koki, which I am not a big fan off because the corn can’t be grinded as well so there are still little kernels (again, it’s a texture thing), and bean koki, made with beans, obviously. So what is koki? I don’t even fully know. It is mashed corn or bean, with a lot of oil and some spice wrapped in a banana leaf and boiled (I think).  It is good though. There is a lady by the office that makes bean koki, and so you can get a serving (MORE than enough for lunch) with a boiled plantain for 200CFA ($0.40 CDN).

You can make a bold and solid assumption that 2 ingredients in some amount, are in every single Cameroonian meal:

First, Palm Oil. Sometimes it is red if it is a more traditional dish, usually just regular bleached oil.

Second, and more delicious, Maggi. Maggi is (are? The cubes are singular, but you buy them in multiples) little cubes of heaven. It is a spice cube, kindof like adding a cube of stock to a meal for flavor. But they are quite small, and I can’t even describe the flavor because it is like nothing I have ever had before. Maggi is in breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Always. I even cook with it in the house now. Eggs? Maggi. Rice? Maggi. Vegetables? Maggi. So. Good. I am sending my mother home with a crate of it.

In other food news, Dana and I ended up at a gathering of mostly American Baptists last week and they had PIZZA. And it was AWESOME. We slaughtered our pieces in like 20 seconds flat and after only spoke about how beautiful that moment was. We also found a little bakery that sells pizza sometimes, which isn’t nearly as good as the stuff the American’s made but it really helped cut the Kenny’s cravings (which are starting to get really out of control). Also, apparently there is a really great monkey head restaurant in Yaoundé, we will see what happens when we go to pick my mom up at the airport, but I feel like Lynch will tell NTV terrible things about me if I don’t at least try it. Stay tuned for that one.

I have stopped torturing myself with food blogs, but still spend at least a little time everyday thinking about what I am going to eat when I get home. I don’t even want to speak of the food I am missing because it will bring too much pain to write about it. Luckily, my mother has stopped being specific about food that she has been eating so I don’t get sad thinking about it.

If my list has made you hungry or curious and a trip to Cameroon isn’t in your future, just go to Maryland. I am not joking. Maryland is little Cameroon; all the Cameroonians flock there. You can eat Achoo and drink Export. Seriously. I feel like it is the Cameroonian version of Fort Mac. Want a Cameroonian? Go to Maryland. Want a Newfoundlander? Go to Fort Mac. Same thing.

Well, this has been a lengthily blog post, and the omelet Kanjo made me is ready, so I will end this now.

Sending all my love to my best friend Shila LeBlanc today, the most beautiful birthday girl. Since you are now 23, we have to eat 23 timbits during debrief. Each. In one sitting. Game on. I’ll be the one weeping in your arms when we reunite. For her birthday, you should all go check out Shila’s blog, she is in Botswana and doing fantastic work! www.shilaandbotswana.blogspot.ca

All my love,
Maura