Food of Bokito

Life in Bokito is still slow. Thanksgiving is upon the states and I haven’t been this homesick since I’ve left. Thinking of family and friends surrounding a table of my favorite foods at home . However, our little community here is determined not to let that get us down. On Saturday, the other programs are coming out to our little village to celebrate Thanksgiving with our version of Thanksgiving. It’s potluck style, so we’ll see how it goes. J But we are getting some chickens and everyone is pretty invested, so I’m it will be fun.

Since food is the topic of the day, I figured I’d take this blog post to talk about the food of the Center Region of Cameroon. Please note, with Cameroon’s huge ecological diversity, this diet is really region specific. I’ll be sure to update with a menu of the north when I get up there.

Down here in the center, we are in the rainforest. We have an abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables, but a lack of meat (or well it’s available but extremely expensive). We are close enough and have roads that are good enough that we are able to get frozen fish from the coast.

The cuisine has a distinct French influence, including baguettes, beignets, and omelets. However, they have also retained their African roots, including using massive amounts of oil (mostly palm oil) in every meal.

This is my typical fare in a day:

Breakfast: a baguette and a 2 egg omelette with onions, tomatoes and a cube of MSG in it. It is also fried in about 2 inches of oil, sometimes palm oil (a disgusting saturated fat) or vegetable oil. I’ve been able to figure out a system of easting just enough to keep me going for the morning and passing off the rest to the kids in my family. They don’t really eat breakfast, unless it’s leftovers from the night before. (PC informed them we couldn’t have leftovers because unheated food is a breeding ground for cholera and other fecal-oral diseases). So I’m happy to provide them with a few calories before we all head off to school.

Snack time: On school days, during coffee break, an entrepreneurial women has taken to stopping by the center to sell us Pili-pili: the African version of fried calzones. They are awesome fried dough pockets filled with fish and vegetables and MSG. Then we head to the kitchen for our coffee, which we drink African style with sweeten condensed milk.

Lunch time: Lunch is a pretty enjoyable experience most of the time. My family is the acting “lunch lady” at the Bokito training center, so everyday my host sister shows up with a wheelbarrow full of food. This typically consists of red beans, white rice, spaghetti (cooked in palm oil), an awesome cabbage/carrot dish, “legumes” which are often steamed cassava leaves, “ndole” which is another type of green leaf stewed with fish, fried plantains, fried fish, and a tomato sauce. For condiments, we have mayo, MSG in liquid form (Maggi Arome), and piment, the Cameroonian equivalent of hot sauce (which I have of course jumped on enthusiastically). Sometimes theres also fresh fruit for sale. On days when we don’t buy from the lunch lady, we can go out into town and grab a baguette filled with beans and hardboiled eggs, or tomato sauce and onions.

Dinner time: this is the only meal that I’ve really been exposed to Cameroonian style eating as it’s the only meal I eat with my family. Dinner consists of  a starch: often a root vegetable such as cassava, potato, sweet potato, or some other tubules I’d never heard of before called manioc and macabo. If the starch isn’t a tubule, it could be rice, or a “couscous” which is actually more like cream of wheat (corn, manioc, or rice is powdered and boiled to create a paste). The other option (which is probably my favorite, is called “baton de manioc”. It’s manioc paste that has been wrapped in banana leaves and allowed to ferment for a few days. I love it.

In addition to the starch, we’ll have a main dish. This is almost every night fish in a peanut, tomato, or simply MSG broth sauce. Extremely delicious. The only times we haven’t had this combination we had either fried fish, a sauce with beef in it, or this dish called sangha which is corn and cassava leaves sautéed in palm oil

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, MSG and palm oil are huge staples in Bokitotians diets.

The best part about dinner, is watching my family eat. They put away so much freaking food. Imagine a regular sized dinner plate. They will take this and put a heaping mound (let’s say 4 potatoes or 3 cups of rice) on their plate and a piece of protein (very small, and the piece gets smaller as you get younger. Often kids won’t get meat at all in typical households. As you can imagine, this leads to huge malnutrition issues) and tons of sauce. They put that back in 5 minutes flat and can still eat more. It’s insane. I don’t understand how these guys are dying of hypertension and obesity yet. Although, hypertension and diabetes is on the rise here in Cameroon.

Most days I really enjoy the taste of the food here. As long as I don’t think about what’s in it, I’m pretty happy. But, I have developed an aversion to palm oil which has really hindered my culinary experience here. The taste of palm oil actually causes a gag reflex now. And there’s no hiding that taste either. It leaves a coating in your mouth as if you’ve just consumed a whole tub of cool whip. Gross. Anyways, besides the palm oil and MSG, things here are nice and spicy and tasty, just the way I like them. I’m trying to keep my portions more American style and sized, and have so far managed to at least not gain weight. I am looking forward to heading to the north though where there is little to no palm oil and more meat and sometimes milk. I am pretty satisfied with the palettes here, but I’m ready for the change.

Anyways, Happy Thanksgiving! Love to all! Miss all of you!