Living Small

Back at Work, with a New Lunch Box

It's not easy going back to work after ten days off, but having a new lunch box (in addition to the new haircut) to show off definitely helps.  I don't know which one shattered my image amongst my coworkers more, the fact that I'm no longer the one with the long hair or that I'm no longer the one with the Hello Kitty lunch box.  Hello Kitty had served me well over the last three years, helping me forge instant friendships with little girls on the street and preventing my coworkers from inadvertently eating my lunch, but she had also started getting a bit grungy.  I saw this lunch box while waiting in line at the Post Office with David, and before the week was over he had found it and purchased it for me.  What a guy!  And the lunch box fits in perfectly amidst the clutter in my cubicle.

Big Bird

For several summers now, David and I have belonged to a CSA, which stands for Community Supported Agriculture. We buy a share in the farm at the beginning of the season and get our portion of the harvest every week at the Farmers' Market. We first learned about CSAs from our friends Wendi and Carola, who let us pick up their share a few times during a summer they traveled a lot. Back then, I didn't know much about vegetables, so it was fun to figure out what to do with things like kohlrabi. Now David and I split a large share with our friends Shawn and Dave, and we don't have to buy much else by way of vegetables during the summer. This winter, our farmer started a meat CSA, so we signed up for ten chickens and forty pounds of pork. Forty pounds is a pretty serious commitment to pork eating, especially for a Jew, but we have a giant freezer in the basement, so we don't have to eat it all at once. The pork should start sometime soon, and we have already received two chickens. The first one was the largest chicken either of us had ever seen. It took David about half an hour to carve up and fed us (lunch and dinner) for three days. Sadly, I didn't think to weigh it to get a sense of just how large it was, but this week's chicken was definitely smaller and weighed in at five pounds.

Weekend Belly Report

Over the weekend, I put quite a few awesome things into my belly.  It all began on Friday night, with a Kobe burger, grilled octopus, and a drambuie-spiked affogato at Cafe Zola.  The weekend continued with carrot cake for breakfast on Saturday, a juicy-ripe Minneola for dessert that night, tons of homemade bread, and Savoy Cabbage Gratin from Orangette last night. The height of it all, though, was a carrot halwa I made last night.  My first attempt at this dish occurred a week ago.  David had brought home an Indian cookbook from work and asked me to make something from it when we had some friends over for dinner.  I had already planned out the main part of the meal, so I flipped to the dessert section of the cookbook and picked out the carrot halwa, something I had never had before, but that sounded quite good.  And it was.  Then last week, for one of his department's evening activities, David ordered some food, including carrot halwa, from a local Indian restaurant.  After tasting that one, I got some ideas for altering the recipe I had, and tried it out last night.  It was so fabulous that I've just got to share my new recipe with you:

Carrot Halwa
3 to 4 tablespoons butter (I never measure butter, but just eyeball knowing that 4 tablespoons is half a stick)
5 cups shredded carrot (about 2.5 lb -- do this in a food processor or with a cheese grater)
1/2 cup raisins
1 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup honey
1/2 teaspoon cardamom powder

Melt butter in a medium-sized heavy-bottomed saucepan.  Add carrots and raisins and stir for a couple of minutes until coated in butter.  Pour in heavy cream, bring to a boil, then cover and reduce heat to low.  Simmer for about an hour, stirring occasionally, until the cream has been reduced by half.  Uncover, add honey and cardamom, return to a boil, then reduce heat again.  Cook on low, uncovered this time, for another hour or so, until the liquid has evaporated and the carrot and (now-plump) raisins are sliding around in the butter.  Serve warm like a pudding (though it should be much drier and more solid than pudding consistency), or cool and shape into balls or squares.  This is great on its own, but extra good with a dollop of Greek yogurt.  Refrigerate leftovers.

It is a bit time-consuming, but if your pot is heavy enough and you keep the heat low, you can walk away from it for a half hour or so at a time without hurting anything.  Enjoy!

Down with Grapefruit Spoons!

I ate my first grapefruit just about two years ago.  Yes, it is amazing that I managed to live for over twenty-six years, most of them in California, without ever eating a grapefruit, but it is certainly true.  Grapefruits always seemed like too much bother, since there is actually a tool specifically for eating them, and I often saw people sprinkle sugar on them, which made me think they were probably pretty sour, and I just wasn't interested in sour.  In fact, I didn't eat citrus at all because I knew lemons were sour and so I just assumed that everything related to them would be sour.  Okay, to be perfectly honest, I really wasn't that interested in fruit at all until I went to Ghana in the summer of 2005.  On my first morning there, I was presented with bread and orange slices for breakfast.  Since one can only eat so much bread, I gave the oranges a try and was surprised to find that they tasted quite good.  From there I branched out to mango and pineapple, and when I returned home began eating a wide variety of fruit.  And finally, grapefruit.  Since David and I don't have any grapefruit spoons, the first time I had one I just peeled it and ate it like an orange, and it worked surprisingly well.  Sometimes this method can get a bit messy, though, since grapefruit peels and membranes are a bit tougher than those on an orange and since grapefruits are pretty juicy, so eventually I tried cutting it into sections and eating the fruit right off the peel, which works much better when I don't want to get my hands messy or when I only want to eat part of the grapefruit.  Last night, though, I went back to the old method and just peeled and ate it, and found the whole process rather satisfying.  Who needs serrated spoons?

Eating the Potato

David and I finally ate the potato last night.  He was rather skeptical, having read that a plant can't be both ornamental and delicious.  The sweet potato vine in his hanging flower basket was definitely gorgeous, so he feared that the potato would be bland and dry.  I pricked it with a fork, cooked it the same way I cook everything this time of year (put it in the oven at 400 for an hour or two), and split it between the two of us (it was a very large potato).  When I cut into it, I was surprised at the color of the flesh.  It was a pale yellow, even more pale than a Yukon Gold, and definitely not the orange color of a typical sweet potato.  It was also somewhat drier than most sweet potatoes, and I was surprised that it hadn't oozed at all in the oven.  David tried a bite to see if it was even worth eating, and declared it good enough that it didn't even need butter.  I agreed -- though it was on the dry side, it had a very pleasant flavor, sweeter than a white potato but not cloyingly sweet the way sweet potatoes can be.

After two visits from the plumber (I think they have been to our house more than anyone else since we bought it), we were also able to debut the new grill last night!  Perhaps I should have tried grilling the potato...

A New Squash

We haven't tried the potato yet, but we have found the best squash.  Last weekend at the farmer's market, David was intrigued by what looked like a gray-green pumpkin.  The name was also intriguing: gray ghose.  To me, winter squash begins and ends with acorn, butternut, and spaghetti.  I had heard of other squashes, but never got interested in trying them.  David, however, is always excited to try new things, so he suggested that we buy one.  The lady who sold it to us recommended cooking it just like an acorn squash (cut in half, scoop out yucky stuff, bake at 400 for an hour, cut side up or down), but told us that it would be a lot "creamier" than other squashes.  We weren't at all sure what that meant.  How can a squash be creamy?  When we ate it, however, we realized what she meant.  It was a lot moister than acorn or butternut squash (though thankfully not wet like spaghetti squash), and David was surprised when I told him that I hadn't added butter to it.  The flavor was sqaushy, but not as strong as acorn squash, and actually quite delicious, though this may have been helped by the liberal addition of comte cheese!

West African Food in West Africa

I actually meant to blog about this a couple of weeks ago, and then totally forgot, but a friend forwarded me this NPR story a while back about a West African restaurant in Accra, Ghana.  I actually tried to go there when I was in Ghana, but found it closed and went to a Korean restaurant in the same neighborhood instead!  What amused me about the story is that it describes this restaurant as a "chop bar," the local term for a place to eat, giving the impression that it is a restaurant that serves local food to local people.  The price tag, however, belies this idea: a meal for two costs between $25 and $45!  I nearly choked when I read that.  One of the most interesting things about food in Accra was the variety of prices.  I once had a complete lunch for 45 cents (kenkey and fish from a street vendor).  Another lunch cost me $2 (fufu and groundnut stew at a chop bar that seemed to get a lot of business from civil service employees).  Lunch at "Taco Bell" (inexplicably named, since they only seemed to serve fried chicken and jollof rice) was about the same price.  At the "Beverly Hills Hotel" I spent about $5 for yams and palaver sauce, and I spent about the same for banku and okra stew at a restaurant that seemed to be a popular local after-church lunch spot on Sundays.  But, while food could be purchased cheaply, one could also spend quite a bit.  The Korean meal cost me about $15, in the same price range as the restaurant in the NPR story.  I also found a market that sold pints of Ben and Jerry's for $10!  These price differences highlight the vast differences in wealth I encountered while I was there.  The restaurant in the NPR story is in Osu, the expat neighborhood in Accra.  Given its location and price, it is clearly catering to a foreign clientele, though there certainly are Ghanaians who could and would eat there.  Perhaps this restaurant is to a chop bar what Zingerman's is to a real deli!

Palm Oil

As I have said before in posts about African food, palm oil is the ubiquitous cooking oil of West Africa.  This isn't the same palm oil as the oil that the Center for Science in the Public Interest has railed against in its "Cruel Oil" report.  CSPI is talking about white palm oil, from Southeast Asia, which it criticizes not only for promoting heart disease, but also because its production destroys rainforest and the habitats of endangered species.  The palm oil used in West Africa is red palm oil, which is probably no better for your heart, but does at least seem to be produced in a sustainable manner.  Red palm oil is the ubiquitous cooking oil in West Africa, kind of like olive oil here.  Like olive oil, it has a distinct flavor and, unlike olive oil, it really is bright red (and full of vitamin A).

Palm oil was the first major "legitimate" European export from West Africa after the end of the slave trade, though in the nineteenth century there was nothing "legitimate" about its production, which used slave labor.  The biggest exporter of palm oil was Unilever, which today is the parent company of many familiar brands, such as Best Foods/Hellmann's and Dove Soap.  Unilever emerged as the result of a merger between a British soap manufacturer (Lever Brothers) and a Dutch margarine company (Margarine Unie), both of which used palm oil as their main raw ingredient.  Had I stayed in grad school, I might very well have ended up writing my dissertation on Unilever.  This company fully embodies free-market imperialism.  Not only does it export tropical oils from Africa, Latin America, and Asia to its factories in Europe and the United States, but it also produces items specifically for sale back to its African, Latin American, and Asian markets.  In Ghana, for example, women walk up and down the streets of Accra in the mornings carrying baskets of bread and margarine on their heads, selling slices of bread and margarine, a popular breakfast in Ghana.  The margarine, of course, is Blue Band, a Unilever product.  Similarly, Ghanaians wash their clothes with Omo (known as Surf in the U.S.) and their bodies with Lux (Caress), also Unilever products. 

I know absolutely nothing about the production of soap and margarine, but I imagine that palm oil works quite well as a raw ingredient because, in the northern hemisphere, it is nearly solid at room temperature, hence its potential to promote heart disease.  In Ghana, I saw palm oil for sale everywhere: a shimmering red liquid, usually in unmarked bottles.  Once it comes to the U.S., however, palm oil looks a bit different.  It is still red, but it becomes cloudy as it starts to solidify.  When I buy it at my local African market, I know it is the same stuff I saw in Ghana (it is imported directly from Accra), but it is about half clear and half cloudy.  On Monday night, I took it out of the cupboard to make some Okra stew, and the whole bottle of oil had solidified, probably as a result of the cooler weather we have been having.  It amazes me how the very same product can behave so differently in two different places, being liquid in Africa and solid in the United States.  Again, very easy to see why one might turn it into a spread, but how do they get rid of the red color?

Okra Stew

After last week's post about African cooking, I got a reader request for recipes.  The problem with cooking West African food is that it is very hard to find recipes because recipes are a particularly Western form of information storage.  This isn't to say that there aren't cookbooks in Ghana, but they tend to be more academic, produced for home economics classes.  They also include a lot of information about nutrition, a result of efforts during the colonial period to change Ghanaian eating patterns (this was to be the topic of my dissertation).  Most cookbooks, whether produced in the early 1950s (there weren't any before that) or in 2005, devote the first half of the text to nutrition information, with recipes in the second half.  Even these recipes, however, are hard to make sense of because they use different measurements than we use (for example, a cigarette tin), involve kitchen techniques that are unknown to Americans (like pounding), and require ingredients that are impossible to come by in the United States (cassava, egusi, dried shrimp).  Furthermore, while it is very easy to find Asian cookbooks written for American audiences in American bookstores, there is no "African Cooking" section at Borders (which probably contributes to the perception of a starving continent).  The best West African cookbook I have seen for American audiences is actually a children's book, A Good Soup Attracts Chairs, by Fran Osseo-Asare (available at the Ann Arbor District Library).  Osseo-Asare is a food historian who married a Ghanaian man and spent a lot of time living and cooking in Ghana, but who writes for an American audience.  Even though the recipes really are written for kids (they specifically say "have an adult help you..."), the food is very much like what I ate in Ghana.

Or you can try my method for okra stew, which is pretty haphazard, but tastes good:

Heat a large amount of palm oil (available at Aicha African Market on Huron street in Ypsi) in a deep frying pan.  Add a sliced onion and diced hot peppers (any kind) and saute until the onion is translucent and the peppers are soft.  Add sliced fresh or frozen okra and a large can of crushed or diced tomatoes (depending on whether you want the tomatoes saucier or chunkier; fresh tomatoes also work).  Bring to a boil, then cover and reduce heat to a simmer.  Cook, covered, about 10 minutes or until the okra is tender.  Uncover and raise the heat, cooking until the stew reaches the desired thickness.  Salt and pepper to taste.  I have also done this in a slow cooker, just throwing everything in at once, cooking all day, and then removing the cover at the end to thicken it up.

Okra stew is traditionally served with banku, a fermented and boiled corn dough, but is also good with polenta or fried or roasted plantains.

African Cooking

I think I mentioned before that, when I went to Ghana in the summer of 2005, my favorite thing was the food.  This may surprise people who subscribe to the typical American view of Africa as a starving continent, but I found food there not only plentiful but also quite delicious.  When I went for the first time, a friend insisted that I bring a case of power bars, just in case, assuming that either there wouldn't be any food or that it would be inedible, but neither was true.

A Ghanaian meal consists of two parts: the starch and the stew, known in Africa as the staple and the relish.  In Ghana, the staple or starch most likely comes from corn, cassava, yam (NOT the orange potatoes we eat on Thanksgiving), or plantain, either boiled or pounded into a dough.  The stew begins with a base of palm oil, tomato, onion, and hot peppers, and can include other vegetables, meat, beans, or peanut butter.  the quintessential Ghanaian meal is fufu and groundnut stew.  Fufu is the staple -- plantain, yam, or cassava pounded into dough -- and it sits in the bottom of a bowl of peanut butter soup.  To eat the soup, you reach in with your hand, grab some of the fufu, and use it to scoop up the soup.  It can be quite messy, but delicious. 

Fufu is unlike anything Europeans and North Americans typically eat, and for that reason, Ghanaians are very self-conscious about their national dish.  It is known as a rather heavy dish, and even Ghanaians typically don't eat it after about 6pm, but they also have this idea that fufu is just bad for white people, that our stomachs can't handle it.  For this reason, when I was staying with my Ghanaian "Auntie" and her cook made fufu for her, she made rice for me.  But I got plenty of fufu at the university and at restaurants.  There is some European and Asian food available in Accra (fried rice seems to be hugely popular, along with fried chicken), but I avoided it, sticking with street food and restaurants that served Ghanaian food.  I found a great restaurant frequented by the civil service crowd on their lunch hour and, when I walked in, the waitress warned me that they only served local cuisine.  When I told her that I love the local cuisine, she seemed quite surprised.

When I returned from Ghana, I wanted David to experience some of the meals I had eaten when I was there.  There are some things that you just can't get in the U.S., like cassava and yams, but we found an African market in Ypsilanti that sells much of the other stuff, most importantly, palm oil and shito, a kind of hot sauce.  In my first few months back, I made many of my favorites: okra stew and banku (fermented and boiled corn dough), red-red (fried plantains with black-eyed peas), and fufu and groundnut stew.  David loved all of these dishes as much as I did (especially the red-red), but after a while I just stopped cooking as much.  Last weekend at the farmers' market, however, we found that okra was in season, so we bought a bunch of okra and tomatoes, and we went to the African market for palm oil and plantains.  The stew turned out pretty well, though I really should have made banku along with it rather than plantains.  I also didn't use nearly enough palm oil.  Red palm oil is the basis of all stews in Ghana, and it is truly delicious.  Ghanaian meals use so much of it that, when you finish eating, your plate is covered with a red sheen.  However, knowing that palm oil is quite saturated, I have a lot of trouble putting that much of it in while I'm cooking...