Cooking Class

Food Bowl
Wonjo Juice drink
a different way of opening a can
making wonjo juice
a water bag (a alternative to a water bottle)

Making boabab fruit drink

peeling smoked fish
boabab fruit and wonjo leaves
Ocher and a Gambian spice Nyasitou and her baby Mohammad ( I want to learn how to carry babies like this!)
washing the meat
pounding the spices

Fruit of Baobab tree

Inside the fruit

Cola Nut
Cassava




Our ingredients
I am sure you are wondering about African food so here are some photos of commonly used foods in African and how they are prepared. We had a cooking class held by Nyaisatou and Maimuma – Nuha’s 3rd wife and a language teacher and the VSO admin officer. They brought a variety of ingredients – as you can see laid out on the table – and we used nearly all of them (especially the Pringles, Grandma would be pleased to know you can get these in Africa!).

Some of the more interesting ingredients are;
The Cola Nut – a very special nut which you should buy and present to the village chief upon entering a village, it tastes bitter and basically awful but it is considered very important.

The baobab fruit – this is an amazing powder like substance which tastes nearly exactly like Mylanta, some people eat it but it is mostly used to make a drink. The drink we made with it was especially used in festivals such as weddings and naming ceremonies. It was made by soaking the baobab fruit in water, then adding powdered fruit drink, sugar, vanilla essence, banana essence, died banana and apple. It tastes amazing – kind of like a melted weiss bar.

Wonjo – Wonjo is the flowers of the sorrel plant. They are soaked in hot water (to sterilize any nasties on it), then it is made by draining out the flowers, adding vanilla essence (nearly a whole bottle), sugar (nearly a kilo), and vanilla sugar. It isn’t that nice to drink, sweet and bitter at the same time, similar to rose hip tea with sugar or honey in it, it leaves a nice vanilla aftertaste though.
The African Land Snail – my class studied farming these last year so I was interested to see large chunks of their meat used in the Ocher soup (sorry guys I didn’t try it).

Bitter tomato – this is related to eggplant. I had quite a big chunk of it in the domoda it tasted nice, but apparently it can be extremely bitter and should be tasted in small amounts (by the unaccustomed palette, the Gambians love it!)
Cassava – this is a root, similar to sweet potato (which is very common in the Gambia but the white variety), it is not as sweet and is more chewy.

The two dishes we cooked were Domoda – a meat dish with peanut sauce (one of the two most popular Gambian dishes, the other is benechin) and Ocher soup. Domoda is made by boiling meat with peanut butter and stirring in pounded spices (fresh chilli, garlic, onion, spring onion and tomato). I didn’t really watch the Ochre but it had the same spice mix with ocher, sorrel leaves, sweet potato leaves, dried smoked fish and African land snail, palm oil, bitter tomato and many other things (I tried it, but I think the smoked fish put me right off – all I could think about was the awful smell at the markets created by the fish).

Both these dishes were served with rice, which I had a lot of fun sorting through before hand to remove stones, grass seeds and any other foreign objects. You can buy packaged rice from the supermarket, but when you buy local rice you need to sort out the various nasties (including weevils) before cooking it.
The food in Gambia is really amazing – and very delicious, although at the moment the market makes me a little queasy I am told it is something the volunteers grow to love.