The Copeland Ramblings/

Food!

I thought I would post a couple pictures of a few things food related. Up until now, we have been fed entirely by our host family. Its been nice… but we are also anxious to eat some things that are familiar. Today we went to the market and bought a few things. We are paying a lady to cook lunch for us 4 times a week, on class days. She will be cooking local food for us. So I needed to buy things needed for making Senegalese food and also some of our recipes. Here are some pics I took today of different food items.

Here are some of veggies we bought today. I have to soak them for 20 minutes in bleach water. If we don’t do this, we can get quite sick. This helps our systems to function well here, its soak the veggies or spend hours a day on the toilet! Hehe!

Orange Fanta. Its super easy to get here and its always nice to have some cold refreshing drinks in the fridge. I love all the random English written all over everything.

This is Iced Tea. I make it almost every night. I make it in these 1.5 liter water bottles. They store well in the fridge and don’t leak. All of my pitchers that I brought are too big for our apartment size fridge that we currently have.
This is a juice concentrate that I use to make juice for the kids. Its readily available here and super easy to make. Just mix 1 part juice and 9 parts water and mix! But I usually make it a lot more diluted. I usually dilute the kids juice anyway, might as well make it that way.

The number one most used food in Senegal is: RICE!  If they don’t eat rice, they don’t feel like they  have eaten. This is the small bag…

This is some mixture that they use in A LOT of their meals here. I am not really sure what is in it, but I know they use lime and salt and oil and other random things. I kind of think its like the go to liquid to put in all of their meals.  As you can see… pretty much everything is stored in water bottles.

Palm oil. Very important and used in many meals. Most of the sauces are extremely high in oil.

Vinegar. So far, in the markets all you can find is vinegar with alcohol. In Guinea I never found white vinegar with no alcohol. I am hoping to have better luck here.

Jumbo cubes. Bouillon of some sort!

Peanut butter, locally made. Its more like natural peanut butter and much more watery. This is used in the sauces. Peanut sauce is one of my favourite African meals.Fishy! Fishy!! Oh ya… it still looks like this when the meal is ready to eat. Gotta love fish head… yuck! Gas bottle for running the stove/oven.

We found a somewhat nice place that is about a 15 min walk from our place. Its called La Brioche Dorée. They have croissants, bread, danishes and some other fast food type items. They have Senegalese style (Lebanese) hamburgers, chwaramas (sort of like a gyro…) and pizza. Most of the pizza options are not that great… but maybe in the future we can take some find some pepperoni and take it in and have them make us something special!

Anyway, hopefully in a few months I can write this post with more knowledge of things available and what things are used for. I hope you are enjoying some little tid bits from our lives here in Senegal!

On this day..

• Baptisms! - 2011
• Canaan's 'Pet' - 2008
• Canaan Loves Arrowroot Cookies - 2007