African yams and other adventures

Sam played a soccer game next to Lake Michigan a few weeks ago, and that gave us the opportunity to stop by a little African market called "Makola." It is called a "super market," but it is really a tiny place with a few tightly squeezed together aisles stocked with the basics of West African cooking. Facing my true dearth of knowledge about West African cooking, I decided to take the "one of each" approach when it came to the unknown root vegetables. Who knows what they are? I said to myself, but we'll try them all. I grabbed the smallest hairy tuber from of a pile of truly enormous vegetables. It was about 16 inches long and about five inches around--a mammoth of a tuber--with a thick, dusty brown skin.

As I continued to wander around, a man led me to the very back of the store in the corner where there were Ziplock bags of freshly made "kenkey," a fermented corn paste. "This is what we eat in Ghana," he told me. I took the smallest package I could find, which still wasn't very small. The clerk then added a tub of spicy shrimp paste to my basket. "About ten o'clock in the morning in Ghana," he said, "people will eat a little kenkey with some shrimp paste and then they won't need to eat for the rest of the day until evening."

That night, I heated up the kenkey and added the shrimp paste: a powerful taste sensation. The spicy shrimp paste--ginger, hot peppers, garlic and dried fish--was just to the edge of my spice capacity, and the peppers were something like a chipotle in their smokiness. The kenkey is a very dense cornmeal with a strong sour taste. I can't say that it was the most delicious meal I have ever eaten.  The sour and spicy fought with each other in my mouth, and I could only eat tiny bites at a time. Later a friend told me that of all the Ghanaian starches, kenkey was her least favorite. But I could see how it was good nourishing food that could take you a long way into the day.

Last night, I finally boiled up my enormous African yam--as I found out that my huge tuber was called. It pureed into a beautiful silky and light texture like my mother-in-laws creamy mashed potatoes, and will make a great base for soup or a starch for some kind of curry. I think I will try it with the shrimp paste and see if that goes better.