Eating in Africa: An Ode to my Favourite Food Blogger.

For the last many years, Nicole made dinner. She made wonderful dinners: homey, vegetarian, colorful, soft, mouth-watering dishes with strong and simple ingredients, often from that week’s farmer’s market. She made roasted cauliflower sizzled in olive oil and salt, chick peas in a tomatoey sauce with onions over barley, quinoa soups with mushrooms and spinach, amazing pastas and pesto, quiches, mashed sweet potato, marinated tofu, corn on the side, even eggplant, which she hates but I love. Her meals were fantastic, always hearty and warm, filling and light at the same time, and enjoyed with her great company at the table or on the couch watching Seinfeld after a long day, a cold beer never far away. I admit I was spoiled rotten, and that’s before I tell you that rarely a day went by without homemade cookies, cupcakes, muffins, or cakes of all kinds filling the kitchen. I had it good.

I’m in Africa now and alone for the first time in a long time. So, in honor of a great cook and an even greater food writer, and since she's not here with me to tell the story herself, I’m sending this report about the food of Grand-Popo, Benin, West Africa:

In the States I’m mostly vegetarian. Here being vegetartian is almost impossible. There’s obviously no tofu, but there are precious few of the other protein-rich plants: few beans, and anyway I have no patience for cooking beans, no broccoli, no peanut-butter, and some really expensive lentils in a can at the far end of town. I also really miss snack foods, like cheeseits from Trader Joe’s, and black-pepper kettle chips, and haagen-daaz vanilla…

As for other vegetables, the local grocery-shack stocks soggy green cabbage, small roma tomatoes that get pecked by the chickens when no one’s looking (but hey, the chickens are free-range), occasionally eggplant and zucchini, wrinkled green peppers, string beans (I have no patience for the endless chopping), avocados that are purply and red with big pits and an odd taste, and ridiculously spicy habanero-style peppers and dried chile peppers. They also sell garlic and small red onions. (Onions are a big crop here, and on harvest days you can smell onion in the air and can peek over fences to see families working small fields or sorting onions into bunches).

The fruit department is more specialized: You can get a delicious personal-sized pineapple for a quarter, and tiny little bananas that are tough and tasty, and papayas which are fine enough but no match for a good American cantaloupe. They occasionally have apples, but they’re brought in from Togo and aren't cheap. I had never seen either papaya or banana trees before, and they’re both incredibly gorgeous. Bananas hang ‘upside-down’ in clusters in the middle of big, broad-leafed palmy type trees with a kind of purple disc coming out of them, and papayas grow at the top of short, straight-stemmed trees that open like umbrellas into canopies of enormous, serrated leaves.

Canned and bottled goods are limited to tuna, olives, tomato paste, corn and peas, things like that. There’s no juice, and you get your coffee fix with nesquick instant, and don’t leave the sugar out unless you like ants in your coffee. Bread is unfortunately always the white loafy kind that you know is terrible for you, but it’s so much easier to make a sandwich than to actually cook something. Eggs are abundant, and mayonnaise exists, so you can make tuna, egg-salad, and avocado-tomato sandwiches. I’ve seen lettuce here and there, but the SF health clinic instilled the fear of God into me about uncooked foreign bacteria so I don't touch it (two of seven yovos here have been violently ill, surely I'll get my turn soon enough).

The staples are manioc flour and corn-mush, either of which is made like polenta but without cheese, just a big ball of solid porridge. Also popular are white rice, couscous, and western-style spaghetti. A typical West-African dinner is pretty good, and consists of one of the staples plus fried fish in a spicy tomato-onion sauce. You can also get chicken, goat, and occasionally beef in that same type of sauce, but there’s an avian bird flue scare and I just could never eat goat.

I’ll only eat fish when I go out, and a favourite spot at the end of town serves dinner for about two dollars but it’s a hike to get there. The fish is fresh from the sea every day, and when you order you never know what it will look like. Sometimes it’s a frightening, full long-headed, toothed predator, other times it's the bottom half and tail of a flatter fish. I’m always grateful for the protein and the sustenance, and also feel a pang of guilt for the animal before me. The food at Chez Desi’s is really good, but on the other hand I’ve heard you can tell the quality of a restaurant by the way it keeps its bathrooms. When I asked for the bathroom, the owner asked me if I intended to pee, and then vaguely pointed to the rear of her backyard. Nearby was a large ceramic pot behind an open-air thatched screen, the purpose of which would have been difficult to discern if not for the smell. There was no water, much less soap, but thankfully it rains pretty often.

My first successful home cooking experiment was with my buddy Jaakko, the Finnish intern, in Villa Karo’s cooking room. A cooking room is similar to a kitchen, because it conatins a rusty stove with one good burner and possibly an old refrigerator, but the similarities end there. The water supply comes from a garden spigot on the outside of the building, for example. We’ve repeated this meal several times with different variations. I’ll call it Grand Popo Soup.

Grand Popo Soup:

Fry four small red onions and some garlic in a pan with low-grade soy or palm oil, and throw in some diced jalapenos.
Add four small diced roma tomatoes to the mix, be careful to cut out the bad parts.
Meanwhile, cook two cups of rice in extra water in a large pot and add a large lump of tomato paste.
Add the fried stuff, add some salt.
Throw in an old sliced cabbage or eggplant or a can of lentils or whatever, boil until they’re done.

Serve with sliced lime in an old metal container and a flat spoon.

It’s somewhat better than it sounds.

I miss you Nicole.

And the food's just a small part of it.