Ghanaian Food

I guess it`s already really time to write a bit about Ghanaian food. Which is really good, and also, they eat a lot, too! Well, the food is cooked here at the school, because they feed both the children and the teachers (and the kitchen staff are one of the coolest people here, anyway!:)) and the children, who live here, have their dinner in the evening together, too. Aright, they eat a lot of stuff, that we eat back at home, too: like they have bread and tea for breakfast - sometimes with salad, too, or oats, or with the bread toasted… ok, the bread is sweater than ours (and it`s also baked here – every Sunday and Wednesday, I think), but it`s very good! They have a lot of fish, and sometimes chicken, too – though the chicken is mostly for me, they don`t have it that much. 

But besides these, they have quite a few typical Ghanaian food. These are for example fufu and banku. They are kinda similar: they both look like a big ball of pasta, they have both of them with soup and they eat them just with their hands (no spoon or anything like that). Just maybe fufu is sweeter than banku. They are a mixture of a lot of kinds of materials, like corn and plantain and things like that, which they mix together in a mortar with a huge pestle (which is like a very big and heavy stick). It takes quite a long time to prepare it. You can have it with for example fish soup, in which you already have a lot of material besides fish: like vegetables and everything, but it tastes pretty similar to the famous Hungarian fish soup :). At first I was a bit confused, eating with my hands: I started using both of them, but then it turned out, that you only use your right hand for eating. Which is pretty hard, believe me, but you can get used to it! :) The point is, that they both are really good, just at first be careful if you have a fussy European stomach, because they might be too heavy for you! Anyway, any kind of soup you can eat two ways: either with fufu or baku, eating with your hands, or you can also have it with rice: you just have to pour the soup on the rice, like a sauce or something like that. I think I have never seen a Ghanaian eating a soup with a spoon, just by itself...

Just today, I had a new typical Ghanaian dish, too: it`s called gari. In this one you have crushed and fried dry cassava and groundnuts which you have to mix with some sugar, milk and water and your meal is ready – very easy, you can eat with some simple biscuits or anything like that. 

I almost forgot, that as a side dish, besides rice and potatoes, you can also have yam. It looks pretty similar to potatoes and it tastes similar, too, but it`s a lot bigger and maybe it has some more fiber. When you clean it, you just have to peal it and cut out the stem from the middle and then it`s ready to be cooked. 

You can also buy a lot of kinds of food on the streets, too. Like roasted yam that you take with some spices or the roasted plantain with which you also get some groundnuts to eat. They are both really great! If we are already talking abut stuff that you can get on the streets: this week I just had some coconuts! Well, now it seems a bit ridicules that we call that thing that you can buy at home coconut. Here you can buy coconuts on the street, that they open up for you right there (just with a knife, you don`t have to struggle with a saw as we did), you can drink the milk, which is so much that I could hardly finish it and then they cut it for you so that you can have the flesh of it. Which is absolutely not dry, but juicy! It`s very-very nice, the ones that we can get home, are really nothing compared to these. And though I`ve never had mangoes at home, I guess it must be the same with them, because the ones that you can have here area really good! Sweet and juicy! 

Alright, I think I will stop writing about food, because I`m almost getting hungry, though I just had lunch… But the point is, that Ghanaian food is really good and I`m absolutely not bored of it yet! :)

You can see more pictures about the lunchtime here.