Forgotten Deliciousness!

“I know there is strength in the differences between us.

I know there is comfort where we overlap.”  - Ani DiFranco

My sister Adzo 

 Last week was a pretty great week. The highlight was definitely the packages I received from my mom and sister. I love my family!! Thank you SO MUCH. That beef jerky was amazing! Beef here is expensive, hard to find, and hard to eat. One time my host mom cooked me a version of beef stew, and the beef was really tough. I remember actually counting my chews for one bite and it was 40 chews! So I was very happy to receive the jerky and I ate the first package way too fast. I’ll try to make the other one last longer. That wasn’t the only food I savored this week. Finding a PayDay bar inside my sister’s package felt like finding the Holy Grail! I made it last quite a while, individually pulling off the peanuts and savoring them for a moment. Mmmmm. Sorry about all the details for just a couple of random American snack foods, but I’m already missing food and have a new found appreciation for the lyric “you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.” At home I would maybe eat beef jerky and a PayDay bar once a year, and yet I got SO incredibly excited when I received them.

Yummy meal I made with my EGE friends: rice and spicy

 peanut sauce with tofu 

The two most popular and traditional foods that the Togolese eat are pate and foufou. Pate is a white blob of mush; well, that’s how I describe it. It's what my family eats for almost every meal of the day. My host sisters make it over their charcoal stove in a pot by combining water and a type of corn meal that is white. It looks just like flour to me, but it’s not. After it’s done, you eat it with your hands and dip it into a sauce. I really don’t like pate, because it tastes like nothing. It also doesn’t help that my family’s favorite sauce is the one volunteers have nicknamed “snot sauce” because of the stringy, gooey consistency. I’ve been able to drop a few hints that I don’t like pate, so my family doesn’t give it to me anymore. I think  most Togolese eat pate because it is cheap to make and it fills you up, but it is completely lacking in nutritional value.

Foufou is much more tolerable for me because it is similar to mashed potatoes. To make it, you boil yams and then smash them up in a mortar with a long wooden pestle. As you smash you add water to make the mashed consistency. I still prefer real mashed potatoes because of the creamy consistency you get from adding milk, but foufou is not nearly as bad as pate, because it actually has some taste to it. However, foufou is also eaten with your hands and dipped into a sauce, which can make or break the meal. In general, I’m having a hard time adjusting to the whole eating-with-your-hands tradition here; I still use utensils.

My favorite Togo soda brand is Youki. This one tastes like

 root beer with a hint of coffee and has foam like root beer. 

My favorite Youki flavor is pamplemousse (grapefruit).

I eat foufou only once a week and don’t get pate anymore. So most of the time my host family makes me rice, boiled yams, salad, or beans. They also love to make sauces mixed with slices of hot dogs. For someone who never eats hot dogs unless I’m at a baseball game, that was a little hard to get used to, but it is better than the “40 chew” beef. My family has figured out that I really like oatmeal and coffee, so that is awesome! Breakfast always reminds me of making coffee in the morning with my mom back home, and the sound of her opening up the top of the Quaker oats container. It may not be Starbucks, but it’s the little comforts like a hot cup of coffee in the morning that make me feel at home here. Thanks again for the American treats! They were delicious!!!! 

My host mom heating up some stew on their charcoal stove