All About that Food: Part 1

I have been meaning to write this post for months. I kept writing things in my head only to have no electricity to type it out and no internet to post it. The entries I wanted to write kept building up and I didn't know what to do with them all, but then I realized that they (much like my Peace Corps service in general) were all about food. Thus, in honor of the recent Thanksgiving holiday, this series is all things food from my past three months at site, complete with recipes!
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Tabaski
October 5th

Tabaski is the biggest holiday of the Senegalese year. Called Eid al-Adha elsewhere, it celebrates the day that Abraham was faithful enough to God to kill his firstborn child for Him when he asked, and God rewarded his faith by having him kill a ram instead. It doesn't sound like the happiest situation, but just wait until I talk about the Thanksgiving story later in the series. Anyways, like many holidays, the celebration has taken on a life of its own. Clothes are an incredibly important part of Senegalese culture and being clean and well dressed is essential to be respected in this society. At holiday time, clothes and appearances again take a central place. Young girls and boys all get a new outfit for the day, which in Katote means traditional complets for the girls and new polos and jeans for the boys. For adult men and especially women, the tabaski outfits are downright extravagant. First, women spend the entire week leading up to the event and even before then getting ready for the day. It was all I could do to get my very fashionable young health workers to focus on malaria instead of their dress orders at the end of August. You have to secure a tailor to make your outfit at least a month in advance and many of them work around the clock to get everything done. In the week before, women henna their feet and hands and get their hair braided. Buckets of fake hair, or mess, abound in everyone's yard as it is braided or sewn into people's heads. Even I got into it this year and consented to have my hair braided.

But, back to the food. One thing that has stayed absolutely true to the origins of the Tabaski holiday is the sheep sacrifice. For two months before Tabaski, sheep are shipped all around the country, mostly from the Fuuta where I and most of the herders live, to places where they don't regularly have herds, like Dakar. It makes for an interesting transportation experience and far too many of my clothes smelled like dirty sheep after the travels of our malaria tournee. Sheep meat isn't my favorite but for the past two years Tabaski has fallen during starving season so everyone is very excited for the feast. This year, I took careful notes for a recipe and took a rough timeline of the events:

morning: pull extra water to use for all the extra bathing and cooking
10:30: kill the first ram and start to skin him (a man's job). Peel onions and potatoes (a woman's job). Depending on how many kids you have, start washing them.
11:30: the ram has been skinned and cut down from the tree branch, the blood has been buried. The men move onto the neighbor's house to kill their ram. The kids are washed and dressed in their new clothes and start to roam the streets. Keep peeling your buckets of onions and potatoes and start to chop them. People will be stopping by all morning to greet you with the special Tabaski greetings.
11:35: We have been looking at food all morning and I'm so hungry I'm shaking.
11:45: Put your biggest pot on the fire.
12:30: First meat snack. There is nothing like freshly killed fried meat.
12:55: At the exact moment the cover is taken off the bucket of onions you've been cutting for hours, a soccer ball lands in it. The biggest dirt clumps are removed, the bucket in re-covered and the kids are sent away to play elsewhere.
1:15: Start cooking (see recipe below)
3:00: Shower, perfume yourself, put on your new outfit and gaudy amounts of jewelry and makeup
3:30: Have your first portion of the tabaski meal.
3:50: Your feede, or age group, is finally ready and so you bring a bowl over to the house of one of your feede members. Everyone admires each other's outfits, then peanuts, mint candies and packaged cookies are served and finally you eat. Following the meal is juice and attaya, and you go home. You shower, fold up your fancy clothes, eat some lunch leftovers, and go to sleep.

Tabaski Feast Stew

Ingredients are not provided for this as I imagine you are not cooking an entire ram for 30 people. Just add what looks right. Amounts of spices and the onion/potato/meat ratios vary from cook to cook here anyways.

1. Brown large chunks of meat in oil, remove. 

2. Mix a small amount of the chopped onions with boullion cubes, french mustard, freshly ground pepper, and salt. Pound lightly in your woyru, or pounding vessel (like a large mortar and pestle)

3. Add uncooked onion mixture to hot fried meat. This is your snack while you are cooking, enjoy.

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1. Mix the rest of the onions with boullion cubes, mustard, vinegar, salt and pepper. Let rest, covered.

2. Salt the cubed potatoes in water. Let sit.

3. Brown meat in oil in a large pot, then add water to fill the pot halfway. Let simmer.

4. After 30 min, add the onions.

5. After 10 min more, add the potatoes.

6. Simmer lightly until potatoes are soft. Everything will be mushed together in a stew-like consistency.

7. Serve and eat communally.

For photos of Tabaski, click here or check out my "photos" tab

All About that Food: Part 2

More food-related news from the past three months...
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Hearth Project

November 10-20

Last year I did a hearth project with my counterparts after starving season to address the high number of children "in the yellow," or at least one standard deviation below the acceptable weight for their age. It was a big success and so we decided to do it again this year. For 10 days, 10 women and their children came to my counterpart's house. They were divided into groups and took turns doing the cooking and donating logs for the fire. They and their children then ate the food together and practiced supervised feeding. However, we improved on last year's model this time around. With my better language and understanding of the village, I was able to have more input and was more hands-on, which felt good. This year we gave talks to the women about what healthy foods were, what categories of food they fell into, and what parts of your body they helped through the complet model, a strategy developed by volunteers that relates go, grow and glow foods to the three essential parts of a complet, the traditional ensemble worn by Senegalese women. We also gave talks on preventing and treating diarrhea and I gave one on nebadaye powder, a nutritious and easy to make powder from the leaves of a tree commonly grown in Senegal, complete with samples. I also kept track of the cooking and did my best to compile recipes of the foods we served.

I started to write all the recipes down here, but then decided it was too much. Check out my brand new "recipies" tab on the top of this page!

After the 10 days, all of the children had gained weight. We will continue to track their progress every 15 days for the next two months. Check out the pictures of the project here or in the pictures tab.

All About that Food: Part 3

And even more food!

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Thanksgiving

I was blessed enough to have not one awesome Thanksgiving this year but TWO. 

The first was with my fellow PCVs at a regional house in Ndioum. Last year, I had one of my best Thanksgivings ever, with buckets of food (no, really, the mashed potatoes and stuffing were in huge buckets), dancing, and lots of laughs. This year was just as great if not better. It made me so happy to have 20 of us volunteers coming together, bringing different family traditions and dishes into a little kitchen in the middle of nowhere and using a one-temperature oven and one-temperature burners to cook some of the best Thanksgiving food I've ever had. It is the communal spirit that every Thanksgiving should be, the reason we have the holiday every year. Maybe being away from home purified the meaning of it for us; abundance is something rarely seen in Senegal, and we rejoiced in having an abundance of all the things we have given up here- speaking English, choices about what to eat, cooking for ourselves, wearing whatever we want, showers, and most importantly, our friends and our food. 

In my almost two years here, I have loved learning about and participating in Senegalese culture, especially holidays. Korite, Tabaski, Tamharit, and even Touba Magal have been a big part of my life here. So, naturally, I've been wanting for a while to give my family here that same gift and show them what an American holiday is like. I decided that Thanksgiving was the perfect holiday to recreate for my Senegalese family. It involves food, a story from America, and didn't conflict with any of their holidays. My friend Lindsay came to visit and help and I bought chickens (an impossibly rare treat in my village), brought cranberry sauce, peas, stuffing and gravy, and made instant mashed potatoes. A week before the "fete Americain" I told the families in my neighborhood that I was planning to cook them American food for the holiday. I printed out a coloring book story about Thanksgiving from the internet, read the story to my siblings and neighbors, and then had them color in the pages and give them back to me. Now, after almost two years here my language skills are fairly good. I can translate from Pulaar to English and back on the fly, I can express most ideas in Pulaar, and I can understand almost anyone. (Exceptions to this include trying to describe skiing and understanding the old men who mumble worse than your sullen teenager.) However, I doubt that the Thanksgiving story really got to my Senegalese family. Have you read a Thanksgiving story recently?

Explaining it to my family went something like: people from England came over on ships to America. England and America are not the same, they are across an ocean from each other. There were other people already there. They were Americans. Yes, they were brown. Yes, the English people are white, and now the majority of Americans are white. But not all Americans, there are Americans of all colors. Yes, there are Black Americans, yes they are real Americans, no, they are not just Africans on vacation. Just trust me, there are lots of different kinds of Americans. But originally it was these brown people. Now, the English people didn't know anything about farming or making food, so the Americans helped them. The brown Americans, not the white English people who would eventually become Americans, yeah. (For better or worse, I glossed over awful violence, terrible diseases, and centuries of racism in the interest of time.) And so they worked together, and they were able to make food and survive. And then the English people said thank you to the Americans and they had a party with lots of food to celebrate. And that is why today we eat lots of food and say thank you. Yeah.

I tried.

But anyways, they got that it was a holiday and it was a holiday for giving thanks. I collected the colored pages from the kids that week and then on the day of the celebration we read the story again in all its colored glory. Then we ate the food, which was prepared mostly by my counterpart and best friend Penda. She did an amazing job, more than I could have ever asked for. We gave out nine bowls of food to friends and neighbors who had come for the fun and I think they actually liked it. Most people ate almost everything (even the cranberry sauce!). I think the stuffing was the least popular, it proabably had too many unfamiliar spices. But, success!

This year, I pulled off making two thanksgiving dinners for about 20 people each and had so much fun doing it. I am thankful to my American family and friends for supporting me from afar, and to my family and friends here for celebrating with me and helping me every day.

For more photos, click here or check out the photos tab at the top!