Feeling hot, hot hot!

Don't they look appetising? I didn't grow them tho, the pic is from WikiMedia Commons

Ok, so today’s a scorcher, but thank goodness for the slightly cooler spell earlier this week. After blistering heat on Sunday, there was a drop in temperature and some rain – just the right conditions to nurture my newly transplanted  chilli seedlings. This is important, because my first attempt to grow chillies this season failed the week before when I forgot to organise AM to water them while I was away for three days – during which time there was a heatwave.  If this lot don’t survive, it will be too late to find any more seedlings.

I don’t grow chillies for myself. I rarely cook with them. I grow them for DadaK and Obaapa, who, being Ghanaian, cannot live without them. DadaK always looks quite betrayed if I give any to other people, or the crop is poor or worse – the plants have died due to extreme heat.

This will be about the 8th year I’ve grown them – squashy orange habaneros, the third hottest chillies in the world according to the Scoville Scale of hotness. I guess that’s why DadaK likes them – in his household they are the only acceptable chillies. They stockpile them in the freezer. But Habaneros are hard to get – which is why I’ve been growing them. Sydney greengrocers mostly stock the pointy red and green chillies, which seem hot enough to me, but perhaps I’m missing some subtlety of flavour. It’s also hard to find the seedlings and they’re only available for a few weeks each year – so you see why it’s important that we had some milder weather to keep them alive. I read on Wikipedia that habanero plants love hot weather and grow all year round in tropical climates, but that doesn’t seem to to happen here.

The most tragic of my balcony-farming attempts.

My first crop of habaneros was stupendous. Hundreds of chillies from just one bush, which kept producing for so long I could afford to be generous. Not only DadaK but AM’s cousin Gyamfi, my brother, work colleagues, friends, all got samples. Some appreciated them, others did not. The pungency of frying Habaneros set off a chain of vomiting in one family. Oops. Then there was the friend of AM who thought they were capsicums and started a food fight with them. Ouch. Or should that be AAAAAArrrrrrggghhhhh!? As it is on YouTube, where you can find hundreds of videos just on the painful subject of eating raw habaneros.

I’ve never had quite as much success as I did that first year. I’ve realised now that they need a lot of manure, and these days I have to grow them on a balcony instead of a back yard, so getting the conditions right is more of a challenge. Last year DadaK tried growing them in pots himself – with great results. Not a large crop but larger chillies than any I’ve ever grown.

I’ve seriously let him down this year. I didn’t have time to go hunting for seedlings at the right time and then managed to kill off the only one that I found. I went looking again last week and could only find a single punnet of three seedlings – but I’m not sure if they’ll be acceptable. They are – according to the label – RED habaneros, not orange. So it’s possible I may end up with a bumper crop of the wrong kind of chilli. But this may turn out to be a good thing. It’s possible that they are really Red Savina, a cultivar of the habanero and the second hottest chilli on the Scoville Scale. I guess DadaK would like that.

Lemony, floral …

 … winey, citrusey, spicy ….. this is the hotch potch of flavours ascribed to the Fair Trade Ethiopian Yirgacheffe coffee on a poster at my local coffee shop. There must be something wrong with my tastebuds because all I can taste is coffee. Oh well, perhaps that’s because I usually have the decaf, which is Brazilian. Anyway, what I really like about this coffee shop is that it is as much a blend of disparate flavours as the coffee is claimed to be.

Thai-Australian owner and barrista “Harry Roaster” (as he describes himself on a promotional poster) has assembled what seems like an odd assortment of foods to go with your coffee, but are all in their different ways Sydney – if not Australian - culinary icons.

In no particular order:

• The famous Harry’s cafe de Wheels meat pies (established 1938 down on the docks & sampled by people as famous as Frank Sinatra and Elton John)
• Portuguese tarts 
• Banana bread (is there a cafe that doesn’t have it?)
• White & dark chocolate brownies – okay, more American that Oz, but they include that unique Australian nut, the macadamia
• Hot dogs – representing the first incursion of US food imperialism, way before Maccas & KFC - although they seem to have disappeared from the menu in the past couple of weeks
• Chinese steamed & BBQ chicken served with greens & rice. Well actually someone else is selling this, but they share the shopfront.

Take it all together and you have foods and beverages from thousands of years of Australian history, all continents (except Antarctica), and appealing to people from the tendy tops to the Centrelink strata of Australian society. And at $2 a cup, it’s the latter group who seem to most regularly frequent the tables  and chairs on the pavement outside. I’d guess Fair Trade coffee’s usually consumed by middle class lefties like me who don’t mind paying a premium, but here the locals are buying it because it’s cheap and tastes good – and are incidentally supporting people who also struggle on low incomes, instead of the multinational coffee companies. I love that.

I can’t remember the name of the place, it’s on Brown St in Newtown.  I looked for it on Google maps but their satellite pic pre-dates the cafe, which only opened in the past year, so all you can see is an empty shop. But I reckon Harry Roaster is there to stay.

Food shock

AM, Owure and 50 Cedis enjoy burgers, chips and Bombe Alaska (!) at the Rexmer Hotel in Kumasi.

It’s school holidays and AM is eating my money. Movies, gaming cafes, junk food, pearl milk tea. Perhaps I should just not give him any money other than pocket money, but I’d rather he went out and had fun than moped around all day in front of the computer. Whatever, he’s going to have to get a job soon, I can’t afford him.

A few days ago he went out with a friend who’s just come back from a trip to grandparents in Ireland and Germany, who was complaining about how much he’d had to eat at his German Grandma’s table. It prompted AM to commiserate and recount his own overseas food trauma. He blamed his tendency to over-eat on our trip to Ghana. Personally, I just think it’s because he’s a child of extremes in everything, but his analysis is that he missed Aussie food so much  that now he’s got unlimited access to it, he’s so relieved that he can’t stop when he should. 

AM told his friend how in Ghana he’d had nothing to eat for weeks on end but rice with a bit of chilli and tomato stew. He missed out on the part of that story where he’d refused point-blank to eat anything else for the last couple of months of our stay. (Unless we went to a ‘European’ hotel , when he’d plow through burgers, chips, steak and pasta). Peanut soup, fried chicken, fresh fish stew with palm oil, all these and more were on offer, but no … now that’s what I call cutting off your nose to spite your face.

However, although it was frustrating to watch, I do understand how he was feeling. (He probably doesn’t think so). I remember feeling the same way at school camp, where at a similar age to him I ate nothing but peanut butter sandwiches for a week and then totally binged when I got home. I also went through much the same experience on my first trip to Ghana. I was only there for four weeks but it was probably only a matter of days before I was craving a simple ham sandwich or a salad – anything but spicy, oily, weird Ghanaian food! At that time (early 90s), it was impossible to find either ham or salad, at least in Kumasi, and I suspect it would still be difficult to find what I think of as good ham, although I hear you can get a decent salad in Accra these days. My saviour was the Chinese restaurant in Kumasi (tender beef! broccoli!), but it was expensive and I couldn’t eat there much.

I tried making my own salad, but it was a dismal, almost inedible disappointment. The lettuce,  carrot and capsicum were bitter and the cucumber turned out to be zucchini (yuk). The tomato was ok but the dressing was awful.

After that, I gave up on substitutes for ‘European’ food and I have never, since, sought it out in Ghana. It’s never teh same as what you’ve grown up on. I’m sure that’s the expereince of expatriates everywhere. My approach these days is to appreciate what’s available rather than mourn for what’s not. However on that first trip it was awful because I got to a point where I just didn’t want to eat anything at all. It was unfamiliar, it was too hot and too heavy, and to make things worse I had a bad stomach bug. I guess that’s the same place AM was in, but for longer than I had to endure it, poor kid. I hope it hasn’t totally put him off.

The next time I went to Ghana I was lucky enough to be staying with my sister-in-law Serwaa, who is a very good cook. Between us, we soon figured out my favourite Ghanaian foods and I survived more than a month in the village, with absolutely no access to any foreign foods (except tinned milk, blech). I still lost weight, due to more or less chronic diarrhoea, but on the whole I was well fed and satisfied. And on our recent trip, I mostly had a wonderful time eating. I just avoided offal and it was all good. So I guess, even tho it had been ten years since the last visit, I’d acclimatised. Just hope AM gets to do the same.

No more blood chocolate?

Eaten these recently? Ghanaian cocoa beans.

I hear that Cadbury have decided to use Fair Trade cocoa in their dairy milk chocolate bars and hot chocolate powder in the UK. This is very good news.

I’ve been a supporter of fair trade products for many years, even before I married into a family of Ghanaian cocoa farmers, and well before it was easy to buy fair trade products.  It just made sense to me that people should get a fair price for their product and their labour. So it’s been good to see the slow growth of awareness, the appearance of the fair trade logo on supermarket shelves, and to reach a point where chocolate giant Cadbury takes such a progressive step is very, very hopeful.

Although I’ve been interested in the issue for a long time, I actually wasn’t fully aware of the extent of corruption and exploitation that have characterised the production of and trade in cocoa. I thought it was bad enough that my son AM had a two year old cousin with scurvy, and that I’d seen children in his grandmother’s cocoa-farming village carefully rescue a broken egg from the ground so that they could eat it. But thanks to a newish book on the subject, Bitter Chocolate, I am now much better informed, and the importance of a fair go for producers is clearer to me than ever.

Bitter chocolate, by Canadian journalist Carol Off, records both the violent and corrupt history of the chocolate industry, and exposes more recent horror stories in relation to what most of us think of as an innocent treat (apart from the calories!) A more apt title might be Blood Chocolate. I’m not the only one to imagine an action movie of this name – Richard Stubbs in his ABC radio program was actually able to suggest it to the author. The book, which I couldn’t put down, has all the right ingredients: child slavery in Cote D’Ivoire, the disappearance of a journalist investigating the disappearance of cocoa profits into the pockets of corrupt politicians, war over access to cocoa producing territory, purchase of weapons with cocoa profits, greedy multinationals turning a blind eye to the violence and injustice, and deliberately keeping prices low. If only it were fiction. But it is the reality behind our chocolate bars.

So it’s in this context that Cadbury’s announcement is particularly welcome. all me naive if you will, but I think the goal of the fair trade movement should be obsolesence, because all consumer goods and raw materials will be traded fairly in some better, future world. But because I don’t really trust multinationals, I think there will also be a role for watch dog organisations – to keep the bastards honest.  But with this vision in mind, Cadbury’s commitment is an enormously significant step.  And I hope, just the first step of many for this company, which was started more than 100 years ago by a Quaker family. Well done. And pay attention, you other cocoa giants – this is the way of the future.

Culinary success – thanks to the humble peanut

I think I should put it on record that when it comes to Ghanaian food I am not a completely hopeless cook, even by ActionMan’s standards. One dish that I have cooked for him, and he has come back for more, is nkatiakwan, or peanut soup.

Nkatia is the word for peanut in Twi. In English they call it groundnut, which I suppose reflects the surprise of early European explorers, to find a nut growing on the ground and not on a tree.  This term seems to be common throughout Africa. A quick internet search on the origins of the word “peanut” found that “groundnut” is indeed an old usage, and “peanut” was first used in 1807. It doesn’t say by whom, where or why, but it did tell me that peanuts were taken to Africa from South America by 1502. And in spite of Garrison Keillor’s cynical remark that “Peanut butter has survived everything that has been done to improve it”, what great things Africans have done with the peanut ever since!

Before I go into the wonders of peanut soup however I will digress briefly and say that it’s really worth looking around to see what enormously creative things people all over the world have done with the very concept of peanut. For example there are scholarly works such as this one on the importance of the peanut to 19th century Gambian trade networks. Unfortunately you have to pay to read them. There is also a faulous conspiracy theory about The Truth which the powerful and ruthless Peanut Cartel is hiding from us all (that peanuts are to nuts what hot dogs are to meat and you don’t want to know what the shells are made of…).

If you are allergic to peanuts it would probably be best to avoid dinner invitations from Ghanaians because you may risk accidental death by peanut soup. But peanut allergies amongst Ghanaians themselves are rare or possibly non-existent. Allergy researchers have noticed this fact and have been looking into it. It may be due to the number of bugs in Ghanaian guts (known to offer a protective effect against allergies generally), or it could come down to cooking methods. Apparently peanuts are more dangerous when roasted. When boiled they don’t provoke a reaction. (The Foods Matter site summarises research. For more detail you will have to subscribe to something like one of my favourite mags, the New Scientist. It’s where I first read about the research.)

In Ghana peanuts are eaten boiled in the shell as a snack – I used to buy 20 pesewas worth for Nana from a hawker who passed by our place every morning, until Maame Yaa told me the doctor had advised against her eating fatty foods. Or they are roasted, ground and then boiled in peanut soup. The ground peanuts are sold in the markets in plastic bags; obrunis l met in Ghana were very happy about this because it’s a bit of a comfort food, and apparently tastes even better than peanut butter back home. I never tested this, becuase I’m not a fan, but I can believe it – so many of the nut products we get from supermarkets taste slightly rancid to me, but Ghanaian peanuts are definitely fresh. And here’s a tip off: Asians like boiled peanuts too, and you can sometimes buy them in Chinese or Vietnamese grocery stores.

However peanuts are also eaten roasted in Ghana. You can buy tiny quantities tied up in plastic or in newspaper twsits and eat them as a condiment with roasted plantains, or add them to etoh, which is boiled, pounded cocoyams mixed with palm oil. In my opinion you need quite a lot of peanuts and if possible avocado as well, to make etoh really enjoyable.  AM thought it was disgusting and so did his brothers, but it’s one of Obaapa’s favourite foods. Before she left for Ghana I asked her what she wanted to eat first when she got there, and it was etoh.

However I think you would be hard pushed to find a non-allergenic person who didn’t like peanut soup. I haven’t found anyone yet – even when I’ve only been offering the version that I cook. Although of course, my version has been anglicised for western tastes. I don’t include the dried fish to which Obaapa seems addicted, (I think she just puts it in everything, regardless), and I cheat and put in some diced chicken breast as well as the whole jointed chicken (right at the end of cooking the soup, or it will be too tough). I do use boiling rather than roasting fowls when I can but I probably don’t put in enough chilli. I do, however, use the correct chilli: habanero. It still doesn’t taste quite right, but it tastes good.

Here is the recipe. I have this recipe because a few years ago AM’s primary school decided to capitalise on how multicultural they were and produced an international cookbook. I thought it would be great if Obaapa contributed so I followed her around the kitchen taking notes one day, ran it through my own test kitchen and then submitted it to the school. The kitchen-stained page linked above is the result. Whenever I despair of feeding AM, this is the page I turn to. Enjoy.

What price a good meal?

ActionMan and I have been engaged in delicate financial negotations recently. I’ve been looking for some extra work to top up the family income, and he sees this as the green light for more pocket money. Not necessarily, I said, as working full time might mean I have more expenses, like travel, work clothes and perhaps more take-away food. (not to mention breaking the back of my Ghana debt).

His solution to this was to offer to cook – for a price. $10 for two meals, $50 for seven (that really doesn’t add up, does it?). And to prove that he could do it, he cooked four nights in a row: pasta, pot roast (at his uncle’s house), steak, pot roast again (at home). He did well. Everything was edible and he learned a few things about cooking. It kind of fell apart over the weekend, and when he finds out today that I didn’t get the job I was after, his enthusiasm may fall apart too.

Not that I’d agreed to $50 for seven meals. I’m open to paying $10 for two, and I might do that even without a second job, but there’s the little matter of contributing to household chores to consider. I reckon he could be doing more than he is, and I don’t think I should be paying for all of it. Perhaps i could do a trade where he cooks instead of doing other things around the house. Not that he’s doing a lot now. He reckons that when he leaves home he’s going to live in a mess because he doesn’t like things tidy anyway. I try and remind myself that I, too, was a slob when I was his age and it took cleaning other people’s houses for a job, to make me more house-proud myself.

Anyway, it was very nice to have my meals cooked for me for four days. Even though he managed to leave a thin film of grease over everything in the kitchen: salt shaker, fridge door, floor ….

It’s not that I hate cooking, it’s just that I like a bit of mental space to do it. I don’t feel I have that after being at work all day. Plus AM and I have totally different taste in food. He likes meat, I like vegies. He likes spicy food, I like “bland, disgusting” food. I like beef, he likes lamb. etc. etc.

When AM was a baby I tried to do all the right things the baby books tell you about food. Introduce one new food at a time, mashed.  Start with banana, avocado, pumpkin. He didn’t like any of them. Unbeknownst to me, whenever they were home alone together DadaK would give him food straight out of his own bowl – spicy, oily, meaty Ghanaian food – and he loved it. No wonder I wasn’t getting anywhere! Many people were astonished that so young a child could eat such hot food. I can only put it down to his African genes or to the fact that I was eating a lot of chilli while pregnant. DadaK was cooking my favourite Ghanaian foods for me almost every night in the last month or two before AM was born.

AM still loves chilli and fatty meat, scorns sandwiches and salads. So feeding him is a challenge. Far better if he gets to know how to cook what he likes and all I have to do is steam some broccoli to go with my portion. Oh, and foot the bill.

I have made attempts to cook African food for AM. Well, for both of us. I’ve tried jollof rice – rice cooked with chili, onion, tomatos and shreds of tinned sardine or corned beef. But it’s never as nice as DadaK’s or Obaapa’s and I end up having to eat it all. Soggy would be the best word to describe my attempts at this classic West African dish, which DadaK pronounces as “Joylove”. Not when I cook it.

At one time before Obaapa’s arrival, DadaK moved back in with us for a while because he was out of a job and convalescing from an operation. Friends sometimes brought food over for him – invalid’s sheep head soup complete with teeth. Not for me thanks.

Faced with the challenge of trying to feed DadaK as well as AM,  I got into the habit of cooking a very tasty  – er – thing – to go with green bananas or cassava. It goes like this: You boil a tomato or two with a habanero chilli, some lady’s finger eggplants and/or okra. Then you grind up some raw onion with the boiled chili and salt, and roughly mash in the vegetables and some tinned sardines. The final touch is to fry a small amount of onion in quite a lot of palm oil and pour it over the top. Soft peaks of mashed eggplant poke through the rich orange pool of oil. Delectable. Truly.

The whole package is called ampesi – which as far as I can tell means ’starchy vegetables and whatever hot & salty stuff you care to eat with them’. Ghanaians seem to name their meals for the starch that’s consumed rather than the protein. Where I’d say “I had steak” they’d say “I had potatoes”.  Well, probably that’s simplifying it, but to my mind it about sums up the different eating patterns of wealthy and poorer countries.

I think I make a good ampesi, at least according to the recipe I’ve outlined above, but I haven’t cooked it for years. Partly because palm oil is totally saturated and I’m trying to be healthy, but also because – guess what! AM doesn’t like green bananas or cassava. He only likes yams, which are much harder to come by and far too expensive for anyone to risk me stuffing up the cooking of them. Sigh. Now I’m really feeling nostalgic for Ghana food.

Stay tuned for my next exciting installment and recipe for a Ghanaian dish that we’ll both eat: peanut soup.

Looking for Michael

I’ve been spending an unusual amount of time in Asian groceries lately. Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai if I can find them. I’m looking for Michael. Or I was looking for Michael until DadaK gave me some of the item in question and I realised I’d misheard him, and it was actually mackerel that I needed. It just goes to show, you can know someone well for almost 20 years and still have trouble with their accent sometimes. (He does with mine, too).

He gave me the mackerel just a week before he left for Ghana. My mission at the time had been for DadaK to teach ActionMan to cook Ghanaian food, so he woud not have to rely on my “disgusting, bland” food while his dad was away. (ActionMan’s words, not DadaK’s). In fact this has been my mission for years, but with the departure date fast approaching, I was feeling a little more urgent about it, with visions of ActionMan living on take-away and sausages for months on end. So he had several lessons, recited to the procedure to me, DadaK gave us the mackerel and a shopping list, and we were ready for a trial cooking session without DadaK’s supervision.

The mackerel I’d been looking for was a special ingredient that imparts a delicious, subtle flavour to the food, although you wouldn’t guess that from a product that’s fondly called stink-fish (because it does. The smell has been known to cause mixed-marital discord, altho not in our house). It’s salted fish. In the couple of decades DadaK has been in Australia, he has been experimenting with a range of preserved fish products, including gourmet smoked trout, and for the dish we planned to make – eggplant stew – the mackerel was the best substitute for whatever it is they use in Ghana. (Ghanaians rely heavily on smoked fish for protein, and often mix fish with meat – which can be a bit of a challenge for anglo Aussies).

I’d like to know how people discover these special substitute ingredients. I would imagine DadaK can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he’s eaten Vietnamese food, yet somehow he knows that he has to venture into a Vietnamese grocery to get stink-fish. He also gets phone cards, stock cubes, plantains, tinned fish, frozen cassava, and if he’s lucky, very tiny eggplants that look like peas.

My fruitless – or fishless – search for Michael paused when DadaK supplied it. But now he’s gone, I’m going to have to find it myself, if ActionMan is to cook eggplant stew (froye). It’s a big if.

Whether it’s because we overdid the stink-fish, or because we didn’t follow the strict instructions to only use Santa Maria sardines, or perhaps it was the prawn stock cubes – our stew, was, well …. way too fishy even for ActionMan. Not subtle at all. It was very disappointing and a big waste of food. I think I had cereal for dinner that night. If we do it again, I’ll have to have a back up meal plan.

The other obstacle is that we’ve discovered the true identity of another of the special ingredients. Ok, it’s just a psychological obstacle. When we bought the corned beef (only Black & Gold), ActionMan read the list of ingredients on the can. I don’t know what got into him. I haven’t noticed him do this before, except for a school assignment last year. If ‘d been able to stop him, I would have, because I would prefer not to know what’s in tinned corned beef. It’s beef, ok, let’s leave it at that. But it’s too late now.

With a look of horrified disbelief, ActionMan read the label: “40% pure beef, 60% beef heart”. Right there at the checkout. Ok, I admit it, we are culinary wimps.

Well”, I said firmly, trying to ignore the rising nausea, “we’ve been eating froye for years and enjoying it. It’s one of our favourite things. We can’t stop eating it now just because we know what’s in it.” (wanna bet?). So I paid for it. And we cooked it. And it’s a pity it was such a disaster, because that’s done nothing at all to beat down our psychological obstacles. Plus we now have several cans of corned beef in the cupboard, which Obapaa left behind because she couldn’t fit them into her luggage.

I can’t say I’m in a rush to cook froye again, so it’s looking like a bleak diet of sausages and cereal for us, over the next few months. However, anytime I’m near an Asian grocery, I do look for Michael. Honestly, I really do.