Once upon a kitchen...

My favorite part about traveling anywhere is experiencing the foods. After visiting a great Ghanaian restaurant in DC, I felt pretty excited about all the awesome food choices I would have in Ghana. Predictably, the food in Accra was pretty spectacular and elevated. We tended to eat in expat-friendly locations in parts of the city connected with embassies or near the NGOs or Ghanaian government locations we visited. Some of these restaurants even used purified water so we felt safe to drink ice with our drinks and even had a few fresh veggies too. Before you roll your eyes at these restaurants, I want to note that the food were always Ghanaian and West African. Specifically, Buka served up classic Ghanaian entrees like banku, fufu, goat and chicken light soup, and kelewele. But, it was also at Buka where I experienced wagashi. In Ghana, wagashi is not a small, delightfully designed confection like it is in Japan, it's a soft cheese made of cow's milk and vinegar that can be fried without melting like halloumi. It could have been that I had not had cheese in two weeks by the time I tried it, but I could not get enough. The vinegar is what all cheeses in my past had been missing! It because a satisfying little treat they happened to have on the menu at the hotel too... It became a little bit of comfort, and even though I was really happy to always order the red red, or the jollof rice, a little bit of wagashi went a long way towards the end of my trip...

Meanwhile, in Ve-Koloenu, the food situation was a little different. There were no restaurants in town, besides a few roadside stands with some breakfast puffs, so our meals were lovingly made my The Matron at the school. We were able to fund our menu, so we ate a bit better than the students, and Obed ate with us as well. For breakfast, it was always pretty simple. Hard boiled eggs, toast with all the various spreads available in the Eastern hemisphere, and this amazing instant coffee (words I never thought I would type) from India. A few days, we even had oatmeal, and it was perfection. Lunch and dinner were always a traditional Ghanaian dish like fufu with groundnut soup, the best red red I ever tried, and even yam fries to go with our chicken and jollof. At first, I am not sure The Matron knew what to make of us. She confessed to us later that she thought we would be like other "whites" she knew (her word). For a decade, The Matron cooked for an NGO down in Ho (Volta's regional capital) that focused on teaching young girls how to do beadwork in an effort to keep them from getting pregnant while they were still in school. Folks from Europe, and white Africans, would come in for weeks or months to volunteer with the organization, and The Matron would cook for them. She said that while some were down to eat Ghanaian foods, many wanted more Western options, so she learned to make pizza, tacos, hamburgers, lasagna, and other dishes in that vein. She feared we would be similar to those people, so she was pleasantly surprised to know that we actually wanted to eat Ghanaian foods. Sarah, my travel partner, was less pumped for goat, and it never became clear to me the difference between cow, beef, and cow skin (I really did ask everyone), so we did stick with chicken and starches, but The Matron would surprise us with sauteed greens, or field peas, and it was always so, so good.

We convinced The Matron to teach us to cook something, and we decided on groundnut soup, since that was something we could potentially replicate easily at home. While we were in Ho (after our hike and canopy walk), we picked up some supplies at a Wal-Mart-like place that sold everything from chicken to flooring, and then after school one day, we headed off to The Matron's kitchen for our lesson.

The Matron dressed for the occasion. Only respect for this amazing woman.

The Matron and her team in their kitchen.

This is where they made breakfast, lunch, and dinner for almost 800 students daily.

The groundnut mixing with the tomato paste and a tiny bit of fresh garlic.

Fun facts, if you let the groundnut paste mixture simmer, oil rises to the top. No additional oil was needed.

Also, fun fact, The Matron only added a little bit of Atlantic sea salt to the mixture. She walked about how the wrong combination of salt and the sugar in the tomato and nut would "make us run". In truth, I had zero GI issues in Ghana, even though there was a lot of great spices...

We added the chicken and then we ate it with some fufu her team had already made (we ran out of time to grind the cassava ourselves), and it was so nourishing. Obed said it was "palatable", which Sarah and I had to laugh about since he meant it as a genuine compliment, but which we took as a "meh". He treated us to some Spanish wine that night too, and we had a great time talking about teaching, and our countries, and the things that bring us together.

On our last day, The Matron treated the entire faculty to a lunch to wish us safe travels. She made Sarah's favorite, chicken light soup with fufu, and Sarah even let her make it spicy. Because it was a special lunch, we also got to pop open some beers to celebrate. We had been worried about food options before we got to town, and we left feeling nourished.

I am still craving The Matron's red red, and that chicken lite soup...