Top Chef Burkina

As most of you may know I love to cook. In this way I take after my father. Although I have not yet attained his level of expertise, I am constantly trying new recipes - even in Africa. Besides the fact that I find cooking a stress reliever, I cook for myself while here for my own health and sanity (I am not positive if it’s safe to eat food cooked by others and it keeps me from going crazy always eating food I am not interested in). With the help of the Peace Corps Cookbook, foodnetwork.com and williamsonoma.com I am continually trying to find new and delicious foods that I can cook in my anti-kitchen, with little or no ingredients and no refrigeration. As some of you may have seen on Facebook, I have already mastered homemade bagels in a PC Dutch Oven (a large pot with three upturned empty tin cans sitting on a bed of sand = convection oven). They are a delicious taste of normality, especially when I smear them with my no-refrigeration fake cream cheese…doesn’t that sound good? After 13 months in West Africa it is actually the best thing ever! I make salad and pasta dishes and even sometimes a curry, but I rarely venture into the meat realm. My life here has been almost completely vegetarian and sometimes even vegan, mainly because I don’t trust village meat and I am not sure how I would cook it. This dilemma arose on the first weekend in November (2011) during my second Tabaski celebration in Burkina. On Tabaski everyone slaughters a sheep to commemorate Abraham almost killing his son for God, so needless to say there is a lot of meat around. My family, very generously, gave me a chunk of “ram”, which I had to quickly learn how to cook. With an unidentifiable cut of meat and only a gas burner to cook with I had to figure out what I was going to do with my ram. With a little help from my dad I was able to braise my sheep into an edible concoction, even minus a few ingredients. It was hard to believe that I had made something fairly sophisticated on my little stove top, but it just goes to show that good food doesn’t require a lot of fancy ingredients and good cooking only requires time, patience and a willingness to eat anything (all of which are skills I learned in the Peace Corps). Still, I can’t wait till I get back to the states to cook again! But until then, keep your eye out for more Top Chef Burkina posts!