The Art of Cooking in West Africa

  Over one hundred degree temperatures, 90% humidity, and a beautiful double layer cake with fluffy white icing oozing out of the middle from the extreme temperatures. This is just one part of my experiences cooking in West Africa. 

  Every soup, every pancake, every biscuit, every baked good is an adventure. I have had many absolute fails that I was extremely upset about.  These fails now make a good laugh and an interesting story. 

  The difference between cooking in West Africa and America is this: ingredients available. Yes, there may be chocolate chips at the store every three months if you are willing to pay $20 for the little bag. 

  I don't use chocolate chips. I don't use whipping cream. We don't put cheese in our Macaroni&Cheese. We don't use smooth, processed peanut butter because it is too expensive as an imported item; we use the more challenging natural peanut butter 😡 from locally grown peanut fields.  (No Peter Pan, no Jif). In fact, our family doesn't use real pumpkins in our pumpkin pie every Thanksgiving; we use a kind of gourd or squash found at the local market.  In this instance, it tastes exactly the same as what we make in the States. We fry our eggs, pop our popcorn, and make our mac 'n' cheese with the unprocessed, red palm oil, our new deceptive secret! 

Cooking late at night on my 11th birthday eve.

    Another major contrast is the temperature (go figure). We don't have air conditioning. So if it is unbearably hot outside, it is most likely unbearably hot inside. But if it rains outside, ah! The wind blows inside the house and through the halls, making the curtains billow. Then we turn off our fans, curl up in blankets, and drink hot tea. But when you are trying to cook a full fledged dinner (think mashed potatoes, green beans, roast beef, gravy, apple pie, etc, and outside it is 95 degrees in the shade....) with our gas oven on in the kitchen and at least two of the gas burners lit, we took the temperature by the stove and it was 120 degrees! What we put ourselves through for a hot, home cooked meal! Stirring the white sauce at our house in these conditions is no small task and takes no small amount of effort. 

Shopping! In bulk....

   Then the power goes out. Now thank God we have a Stone Age gas oven and stove that only requires electricity to light - unless it stops working or the power goes out. Then we use good old matches. The oven is a different story. I had to devise a not-so-complicated, several knob turning and button pushing method of lighting the oven that only I use. Everyone else in my family uses matches.

Our Oven
(photo by Jackson, an up-and-coming media specialist)

  My favorite part about cooking/shopping in West Africa is the fresh produce. Our family once had several banana trees outside of my bedroom window. Not only did the song birds wake me up every morning while they were gathering the nectar, we had what I called 'sweet bananas' once every year. They were far better than any bananas we found at the market and WAY better than any bananas in America. The pineapples here are the best, and the mangoes are superb.  The one fruit that I believe is better in America than here is the orange. Most of the good oranges here looks like this:

And these are pretty good! But not Florida/California oranges.

Shopping at the local market; yes, that is toilet paper in the background!

Banana picking in our backyard.

So in Jackson's words, to sum it up, "Life in West Africa can be hard; but it's awesome!"  I am glad that I grew up cooking here and no where else, because if you start hard you can take it anywhere! Not that cooking here is actually very hard, but compared to when we are in America, I think that it is slightly more difficult. Basically, God is using my childhood in West Africa to prepare me for life in the big bad world 😁 Cooking here is boss!!!


*Post inspired by Savannah. Thank you!