One morning shortly after I returned from vacation, I walked
out of my room and found my host mom sitting at the table drinking a cup of
coffee. “Surprise!” she said in French
before reaching over to give me a kiss on my left, then right, then left cheeks. Khady Ndiaye, or Khady Ndiaye “Toubab”, as
the neighborhood kids call her because she’s more Western than the average
Senegalese woman, has come back from France where she works cleaning rooms at a
ski school 8 months out of the year.
She superstitious about flying so she comes and goes without any advanced
notice. Khady (pronounced like “hottie”
with a guttural H) doesn’t like her job there much, but she gets paid well and,
as a result, can afford to own her own house in Senegal. Ibou and I rent rooms from her and our
association offices are located in her compound. Much of her family lives next door, although
her relationship with them is a bit strained so she keeps them at arms-length. The compounds share a wall which used to have
a door leading from one to the other, but after a dispute with her father’s
second wife, she bricked it up. That’s
Khady for you! She’s a force to be
reckoned with. People both love and fear
her. Although she returned unexpectedly
in the middle of the night, it didn’t take long for people to realize that she
was back. Within 24 hours, the peace and
quiet to which Ibou and I had grown accustomed was gone. In its place was a flurry of activity as
Khady began executing the home improvement plans she’d been envisioning while
away. Gardeners showed up to hack away
at or dig up and move the overgrown plants.
Brick layers appeared with pile of sand and bricks to begin paving a terrace
outside her living quarters. Workmen deconstructed
a thatched-roof hut over our classroom space so it can be replaced with
something more substantial. Khady is
wise with her money and is investing it in her compound as opposed to doling it
out to whoever asks for it, which is the more common trait here in
Senegal. She definitely has a good head
on her shoulders.
In addition to filling her house with workmen and
construction debris, she’s also filled it with friends. Daily, there are a handful of folks who come by
to catch up with her and hang around most of the day. We all eat lunch together, with 10-12 of us
around the bowl, and most of them stay for afternoon tea. Last week, Khady decided that I need to learn
how to cook Senegalese food. This
thought had, of course, already crossed my mind since cooking has always been one
of my favorite pastimes, but I hadn’t quite gotten around to it yet. It wasn’t
an appealing prospect at my neighbor’s house where I’d been eating lunch since
Khady left last December because their “kitchen” is a small hot cinderblock room
with soot-stained walls which is shared with a family of mice and about 10,000
flies. I also, thought that learning to
cook here wouldn’t really translate back home because the pots, pans, and
“appliances” are so different. All meals
are cooked over a single propane burner or a pile of burning wood (sometimes even“paper briquettes”!), so there is a certain order to how things are
cooked (e.g., the fish is fried first, then the oil is used to make a sauce for
the stewed vegetables, then the rice is steamed over this mixture, then the
veggies are removed, and finally the rice is added to the liquid.) Even though we have a four-burner stove in
the indoor kitchen here, no one ever uses it but me. This method of cooking outdoors, using one
pot, is well-engrained into the fabric of the culture and it’s not going to
change anytime soon.
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| This will soon be a new covered classroom |
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| Khady washing dishes amid the debris |
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Most of the greenery in our compound got hacked away,
but I suspect with all of our heat and rain, it will be back in no time. |
Anyway, I decided to take her up on the offer and have
started to prepare some meals under her tutelage. Had I known how many “toubab points” that
would have gotten me earlier on in my service, I would have done it sooner. The first afternoon, I made a simple tomato
sauce to have over the millet couscous that someone brought us from an outlying
village. Couscous is “village food”, you
see. People in the cities eat rice. This is an unfortunate cultural divide as couscous
is made from local millet or corn and is so much more nutritious than the
imported white rice that most people I know eat. My sauce consisted of oil, tomato paste, water,
onions, hot peppers, vinegar, potatoes, and spices. It was far from rocket-science, yet you would
have thought I’d just sent a man to the moon by the way people reacted to a
“toubab” cooking a Senegalese sauce.
Anyone who heard the tale, which spread like wildfire, came by to ask me
about it and giggle. Maybe this was the
other reason I hadn’t been inclined to do this until now--I certainly don’t need any other reasons to
stick out around here. After the success
of my couscous sauce, I was next charged with Ceebu Yaap, or Rice with Meat,
which is very descriptive of the end product.
You’d never guess that a platter of oily rice with a few morsels of meat
in it would take several hours and many steps to make, but it did. It went something like this:
- We washed ½ kilo of meat in a basin of water
since it spent the morning at the market covered in flies. Remember, a ½ kilo
is just over 1 lb (before the fat cooks off) and we were serving this to 12
people—not a lot of meat.
- Next, Khady and I held onto each piece of meat
with our right hands (the “clean” hands), stretching them taut, then I used a
dull knife to cut the pieces into smaller pieces.
- I then chopped 2 onions in the palm of my hand
and added this and the meat to an aluminum Dutch oven called a “marmite” with ½
liter of oil and basically deep fat fried these for 15 minutes or so.
- After the meat and onions were crispy, we added
3 liters of water and, pardon my French, boiled the hell out of it for at least
an hour.
- Meanwhile, with a large wooden mortar and
pestle, I pounded away at an onion, many cloves of garlic, a couple of bell
peppers, 25 CFA worth of hot peppers (yes, that’s the measurement I was given),
black peppercorns, and Maggi and Adji spice packets (aka MSG-laden spice mix). Pulverizing this into a saucy paste was a
good upper arm work out, but you must be careful that the mixture doesn’t
splash up and hit you in the eye, which, of course, I was not.
- Before adding this saucy mixture to the pot, I skimmed
off the oil. At this step I got excited
for a minute because most Senegalese dishes are really oily, but then I
realized we were going to add the entire ½ liter of oil back in later.
- Then I rinsed 2 kilos of rice (that’s about 4½
lbs dry weight--a lot of rice) and placed it in a steamer pan over the boiling
mixture and covered it, wrapping a long piece of fabric around the two pots to
keep in the steam. This is why we
removed the oil, so that the pot would produce a better steam.
- About a half hour later, when the rice was soft
and fluffy, I poured it into the boiling mixture with all of the oil that I’d skimmed
off and cooked it until the rice has absorbed all of the liquid.
- Finally, I transferred the mixture to a large platter, scraping the crunchy rice that was stuck to the bottom of the pot and placing it in the middle as a garnish, and listened to all the oohs and ahhs from our guests as they gobbled up this
high-carb, high-fat meal.
This weekend, my friend Kelsey came to visit. We were both in Thiès on Friday for a Girls
Camp planning meeting and came back to my site together to work on some of our
assignments. We decided to cook an “American”
meal for dinner on Saturday night and prepared a burrito bar with tortillas, marinated
meat, seasoned black beans, sautéed onions and peppers, grated cheese that
Khady has brought back from France, chopped lettuce that Ibou grew in his
tabletop garden, and mango salsa. Everyone loved it. Ibou, who usually eats
like a bird and has been sick for the past week, wolfed down his entire burrito
before mine was even wrapped up. Khady
informed me that a meal like this would cost 7€ per person in France, and Khady’s
brother and nephew were glad that they’d come to visit just as we were putting
the meal on the table. The next morning,
we shared the leftovers with the guys working here and they all came over to thank us
personally. I might just be making that
Ceebu Jenn sooner than they thought!
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| Ibou, Fatou, Coumba, and Khady |
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| Ahhh! A yummy burrito. |
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| Even this little pipsqueak enjoyed the meal. |
