Category: What am I to eat?

So. I just started my first loaf of bread machine
bread. It has not gone as planned so
far, we’ll see what I get out of it. No
problem, I have 5 packages of biscottes in case the bread doesn’t work.

Ok. This recipe is
for a 2 pound loaf. That seems like a
lot of bread to me, and I’m not sure if I have 4 cups of flour, so I’m already
on dangerous ground-I’m going to do fractions and halve it. Should work, right?

 Next. ¾ cup warm tap
water. Hmmm. No tap water here. How warm is the water in my filter? Seems cool to me. Ok. I’ll assemble and hook up my new stovetop and heat a little water. But, I’m doing this all before the
electricity has come on, so that I can get the bread baking early enough. So, I can’t see what I’m doing with the
stovetop. No problem, plan B, use hot pot.

Ok, I now have warm water. And nothing to measure it with. I
only have nifty little Pampered Chef thingies for dry ingredients, nothing for
liquid. How clever of me. And how obvious that I never cook. Ah hah! I inherited a Pampered Chef mixing bowl that can be used to make a
Barbie cake-and it has measurements on it.   And I can make a Barbie cake! Maybe later.

Water, check. Oil,
check. Salt, check. 1 tablespoon sugar. All I have are sugar cubes. Crush, crush, crush. No problem. Phooey. Where did I put the
tablespoon? Search frantically, can’t
find it.  Did I even really have one? Quit searching for tablespoon that may or may
not exist. Look in Wild Boar on the
Kitchen Floor to see if it has teaspoon to tablespoon equivalents. Nope. But it does tell me that three cubes of sugar equals one tablespoon. Nice to have a recipe book written for West Africa! But,
are they three small sugar cubes like I have here or three large sugar cubes
like we had in France? I’d better go ahead use the crushed ones to
be sure. The Jungle Camp Cookbook tells
me that there are three teaspoons in a tablespoon, so I’m good to go!

I added the yeast, put the bread bucket in the machine,
pushed some buttons, and in three hours I’ll have something made of flour. Tune in tomorrow…

Lunch today was goat and cornmeal mush, as usual. With my incredible linguistic prowess, I
asked if there was rice or fish, but there wasn’t. That’s ok, I got some nice pieces of
goat-lunch was 50 cents.

 After I had mine, I saw them fill a plate with some other
kind of meat. Still using my incredible
linguistic skills, I asked what it was. They said fe younfe, or something like that. I trotted out my favorite mmm-belly-may
phrase: “What is that? I don’t
understand.”

 Lizard. Hmm. Not feeling brave or adventurous, I stuck
with my goat. Driving from the city last
week I did see people holding up huge lizards, about 3 feet long including the
tail. I’m sure they’re good eating,
probably taste like chicken. Maybe next
time…

Last night I was at a grocery store in Ouagadougou.  That’s fun in and of itself, saying Ouagadougou:  Wagga-doo-goo. 

They had some nice things at this supermarket-like a pint of really good looking ice cream.  For $22.  I am not kidding.  I couldn’t believe it.  One little pint.  Twenty two bucks.  Who buys this stuff?

These are biscottes, one of my staple foods.  At lunch I eat goat, but in the evening I have pseudo-sandwiches.  I call it that because bread is hard to come by here, and gets stale quickly, so I eat biscottes.  They are usually available in the stores and don’t get stale.  Ok, so they’re not really tasty either, but they’re ok with tuna, Laughing Cow cheese (which is really cheap here, since they’ve never heard of the South Beach diet), canned hummus, or peanut butter and Nutella.

But, I’ve been getting tired of biscottes, so I bought a bread maker from someone who is leaving.  I figure I can bake bread during the 7 hours the electricity is on at night, right?  There’s a great bread machine website, so I found the instructions I needed, as well as tons of recipes.  But, now the problem is, there’s a wheat shortage.  So, the bakeries are not baking bread, and I’m not finding flour in the stores.  Weird.  I bought two big packages of biscottes to take back to the village with me.  Someday I’ll use that bread machine…

After communing with the ostriches from a distance the day before, I of course ordered the plat du jour-ostrich lasagna.  Here it is-some noodles, a lot of ostrich, and some white sauce. 

Being the intrepid traveler that I am, I had a baggie in my purse, so when the waiter wasn’t looking, I scraped the ostrich and sauce into my doggie bag and just ate the noodles.  Buddy LOVED the ostrich, and I didn’t feel guilty about wasting food.  You tend to feel guiltier about that being over here, you know?

I’ve heard that ostrich is good eating, but I wouldn’t recommend it as an ingredient for lasagna.  Probably goat wouldn’t be much good in lasagna either. 

One of the good things about having to come south is eating something other than goat .  Not that goat isn’t good eating, but a little variety is nice.  Like this yummy Thai fish-in-a-coconut.  (I couldn’t remember the name of it from the menu.)  It’s simmered in coconut milk and spicy enough to be interesting without setting my mouth on fire.  I guess there are some compensations for running up and down the country…