Food Blog of Ghana.... for Charlie!

Before Ghana leaves my head totally I must record this very important part of my stay there, it was always a source of conversation between volunteers and sometimes of contention also!

Volunteers were provided with dinner, but had to sort breakfast for themselves. On my induction by the "senior" volunteer I was told she had eggs and avocados for breakfast every day which seemed nice and I liked the idea of getting fresh avocados, but on a closer inspection of the village it seems they had gone somewhat out of season. So for 6 weeks I ate porridge with nuts and bananas for breakfst. Apart from when we were travelling, in one particularly lovely resort I had a lovely fresh fruit salad by the sea, under palm trees!

Lunch, whilst volunteering was suggested to us by the boys, they had a favourite place, a green and white striped hut with a glass box in which was kept the fried chicken and two cool boxes, on with rice and one with "salad" (shredded cabbage and spring onions). Frank's chicken was pretty good, but there is only so many days in a row a person (other than the boys apparently) can eat friend chicken with copious amounts of fried rice. Especially when all other food is swimming in a litre of palm oil. Frank's chicken never made anyone sick though, unlike the fried chicken in our local village (Frank was in the town where we worked).

The other lunchtime option was the 'red-red lady'. Also in a green and white striped wooden hut, but this time with space to sit and eat off plastic plates. Red-red is made from boiled pinto beans (lots of them) coated in crushed up cassava (gari) and then miwed with several large spoonfuls of palm oil (which gives it the red look). Usually served with fried plantains, it became my favourite ghanaian food, but again I had oil issues, so started eating it with steamed rice and tomato sauce. Yum. But repetitive.

The evenings were always something of a gamble. We could be given red-red (but with meat), cabbage stew (much more appealing than it sounds, and its full of veg!), cocoyam stew (kind of spinachy leaves) jollof rice (rice in a tomato paste) all good. Or we couldbe given groundnut stew. Very Very bad. Some people liked it. I honestly couldnt stomach it. and when you think that its basically a sauce made with peanut butter, litres of palm oil, goat bones and garden eggs (pale squelchy white peppers), served with rice balls (mushed up huge balls of gooey rice) its pretty easy to see why.

For Groundnut stew nights I kept a secret stash of things from the amazing supermarket in the mall. There you can buy many exciting things, including cheese, cadburys chocolate (I found rum and raisin cadburys - its the best thing ever, dopes this exist in the uk?) and pringles. AND VEGETABLES! one night i ate a whole packet of raw french beans. It was great. Another night I ate a whole tin of peas. Not so good. Also had a packet minestrone soup, which came out pink. Alternatives were camambert and crackers, or cheddar sandwhiches (with bread from the mall, the bread you buy in normal shops is terrible).

In fact theere are several types of bread. brown bread is ok but not available in very many places; sugar bread, tastes like bad brioche, theres another kind i forget the name of which is equally bad,b ut in my last couple of weeks i discovered teabread, amazing! Teabread is often sold in the morning at street stalls with omlettes filled with peppers and onions - delicious. this is usually accompanied by nescafe or lipton with condensed milk or milo, sort of like ovaltine.

Unfortunately it was only in the last weeks that i discovered street food, because it is amazing, and so cheap! The man at the bottom of our road bbqd goat steaks every night and coated them in pepe, a spice mix. At the top of the road, outside the bar with the TVs for watching football a man sold similar but with so much pepe eating them became a bit of a challenge. other kebabs were beef ones (bought by the man whose son i shared my seat with on the 12 hour journey back from tamale) and some kind of sausagey type spicy thing. all excellent. Since being in Togo Ive eaten many giant bbqd steak sandwhiches (on baguettes hooray) for about 1 pound or less. Other good street food in ghana is roasted plantain with ground nuts (peanuts). not so good are meat pies. I had one inAccra on the advice of another volunteer. It was a hunk of dry crumbly pastry and about halfway down was a think strip of colour (the meat, supposedly). That went in the bin. But then I was encouraged to try again, Sam, the American girl had not eaten one, and the ladies at Kpobiman had made some and gave her one (had she already tried this she probably wouldnt have), and apparently it was good. So I agreed tot ry again and was sent off from Ghana with two bags of delicious beef and onion pasties (which i didnt make iot through!).

Another key sign of mytime in Ghana was fanmilk, and icecream company which sells its wares in sachets sold my boys on bicyles with horns. They have various different options (and in Togo different still) including fanyogo (yogurt and my personal favourite, but a disturbingly luminous pink, i discovered when a baby spat it all over my socks); fan ice (described as being like mcdonalds ice cream) and fan choco (gives a nice little bit of chocolate flavour to an otherwise chocolatelessworld!). There were days when we would sit in the office waiting to hear the fanmilk horns, and times when the boys on bicycles were literally chased down the road by us. Amazing.

I did manage however, in one week, to eat spag bol, fillet steak, pizza, chicken curry, and bbqd chicken with mango salsa. Its amawing what you can find when pushed.