(RM) Food list

Food list

This entry is actually so long that I had to send it in two batches; the intro is in the entry called 'Food and recipe challenge'.

Discalimer:
Let me warn you that you’re not obliged to read any of this. I go into a lot of detail on the random foods. Don’t complain that it’s boring - only read it if you’re really interested! There’s a table of contents to sum up the main things, followed by really detailed descriptions.


STARCHES
We have kwanga with every meal except breakfast, when we eat rice. In addition, for variety, I try to ensure that we’ve got at least one other starch with each meal.

- Kwanga
This is the main starch around here. I believe it’s made of manioc tubers, though a lot of transformation has happened to get it to kwanga form. We get it in logs, about a kg each, which are wrapped up in big leaves. The logs are put on a shelf over the fire to get hot, and then they’re chopped up into chunks and served up in a big pot. We grab a chunk, squeeze off a hunk of it, and dip it in the other food. I find it’s got a consistency similar to a glue stick, although its actual stickiness varies depending on how many days it’s been sitting in the pantry. The colour is white, with a bit of clearness to it, sort of like congealed rice noodles. It’s not that flavourful, nor is it all that absorbent, so it doesn’t soak up sauces that well, but it’s sticky so it’ll accept a good mixture of spices. Kwanga is the staple food here, so it’s served with pretty much every meal. It’s also fairly portable, so it’s useful for hiking.

- Patates douces
These are basically potatoes. They’re a bit sweeter than the spuds I’m used to. They’re also fairly small, so they must be a pain in the ass to peel. I’m glad I don’t peel them! We get them peeled and boiled, and they’re served in a pot. I suppose they could be mashed too, but that’s not done for us. Sometimes I mash them in my bowl and mix other stuff in with them.

- Lombardo
These are similar to potatoes, but with a different taste. They look the same as the patates douces, but have a slightly redder flesh. The texture is almost the same, but the taste isn’t as agreeable. They’re served the same way as the patates douces, sometimes together in one pile.

- Benkufu
These tubers look similar to the potatoes and lombardo from the outside, but their texture is very different. The flesh is very white, and it’s filamented linearly. They are also prepared by peeling and boiling. If they’re boiled too much, they turn to mush, but the filaments sort of hold them to their shape. They can also be fried in local oil, or placed in the hot coals and cooked like that.

- Fufu
This is local flour made by grinding down the benkufus. It can then be mixed with water to make little patties or whatever. We haven’t had any of it since I’ve been here.

- Maize
We get little corns on the cob. The kernels are so hard! They’re boiled up, but it’s quite a pain to actually eat the kernels since they’re so hard. They’re really eaten by the mice in the pantry, too, so I don’t think it’s very practical to get maize.

- Plantains
OK, these may be fruits, but I’m sticking them in this group because of their role in a meal. They’re peeled, sliced into manageable sections, and prepared a few ways. Usually they’re just boiled. Sometimes they’re buried in the hot embers of the fire to cook, and they get a nice crust. The other way is to fry them in local palm oil, although that takes tons of oil. We had them fried once. We get plantains by the large bunch, and they last a while, so we generally have plenty on hand. They’re not really considered veggies, but are rather like another starchy accompaniment.

- Rice
We get huge sacks imported by plane from Kinshasa. We eat rice for breakfast every day, and it’s often the starch (in addition to kwanga) we have with our lunches and dinners.

- Spaghetti
This is an imported luxury that’s enough for a couple of meals between planeloads.

- Couscous
Another imported luxury that only lasts a few meals.

- Flour, yeast
This is imported and used to make some bread, although it’s hard to make bread in pots over a fire.


GREENS
I try to ensure that we’ve got a serving of greens with most meals, although they’re only good for a couple of days on the shelf. When there’s no greens left in the pantry, we usually revert to beans.

All of the greens are prepared the same way: they are mashed up, cooked with some water and oil in a big pot, and with some garlic, onion, salt, and tomato paste. The end result generally looks like soupy green mush, and I find that they all taste pretty similar.

- Epinards
This is spinach. It’s the same spinach as we have in The West. We get it in little bunches of fresh leaves that pretty much have to be used the day we get them or they go bad.

- Matembele
This stuff is similar to spinach, but somehow different. I can’t really describe how it’s different though. I guess the bunches are bigger, but the resultant pot is generally pretty comparable.

- Pondu
This stuff comes in big bunches. The stalks are green, with smaller red branches and green leaves on the ends of those. About half of the leaves are removed, and the other half are discarded with the stalks. I don’t understand which ones are to be kept and which are discarded, but the cooks do. It’s mashed up and cooked with tons of (local) palm oil instead of the moderate amount of vegetable oil used with the other greens.

- Nkoti
I’ve never had this, but it’s one of the available local greens. It’s not very popular at camp though, so I get the impression that we won’t be using it much.

- Bitekuteku
I've never had this either, but I guess it's like the others.

- Spaghetti local
This is not spaghetti, and not really a green either, but I don’t know where else to categorise it. It’s basically the pith of long stems from some big leaves. The leaves are discarded, as is the ‘skin’ of the stems, leaving long pithy bits that taste good. They range in length from about 10 to 25 cm (5 to 10 inches), and about half a cm in diameter. They are prepared identically to the greens, though their taste is different.


VEGETABLES
- Aubergines
These are small green eggplants. They’re prepared by peeling them, boiling them, and mashing them up with some salt and probably some tomato paste, garlic, and onion. They’re tasty.

- Courgettes
I guess this is squash, although we haven’t had it since I’ve been here. Apparently it’s prepared by cubing and boiling.

- Haricots
These are our beans, imported from Kinshasa. They start as dry greenish-pink beans and end up as soupy red beans. They’re prepared with salt, onion, garlic, and tomato paste. This is the backup vegetable for when none of the others are around.

- Peanuts
OK, I don’t know where to categorise these, so they’ll get tossed in with the veggies. These are produced locally. We generally have them roasted. They’re good mixed into other dishes, particularly the greens. They add crunch, which is missing in everything else we eat. They’re also a good snack between meals. Once we had peanut sauce, which was basically peanut butter. The peanuts were mashed up, and some salt and pili-pili (chili pepper) was added for flavour. That was our vegetable for the meal.

- Mbika
These look like pumpkin seeds, but I think they’re actually calabash (another type of gourd) seeds. They’re prepared by mashing them up into a paste, adding local palm oil and tomato paste, and some salt. The mbika sauce has a good texture, and a taste somewhat like peanut butter. We eat it as the vegetable of a given meal.


FRUITS
- Papayas
We eat these for breakfast, mashed up in rice. We grow papayas at camp, although they don’t ripen very often. Unripe papaya has been used once in a creative curry meal with coconut.

- Bananas
We get these by the whole bunch. They’re little and sweet. The mice like them too.

- Oranges
The ones we get are green and somewhat sour. They’re a lot tougher than the Sunkist variety.

- Limes
Little, shiny, and slightly yellow. Good as a seasoning on papaya or avocado.

- Lemons
These are thick, green, gnarly, and sweet.

- Pamplemousses
These are primitive grapefruits. Essentially half of the fruit is pith. We generally have these for dessert after dinner, chopped up into usable bits so we chow into the fruity sections and leave the dividing elements. They’re pretty sweet; probably sweeter than the oranges.

- Avocados
We get the larger variety here than the little Mexican ones generally seen in North America, although they’re not always that large. We eat them for breakfast, mashed up and mixed with rice. We’ve got several young avocado trees at camp, but they don’t produce fruit yet.

- Coconuts
We get these husked, similarly to the ones in the stores of North America. We generally eat chunks as snacks. Once we had a curry of unripe papaya cubes with coconut chunks, stewed in a spiced sauce (imported curry powder) and served over rice. That was great.

- Pineapples
We actually grow these at our camp, but they take forever to produce a single pineapple. We also get them every once in a while from the village.

- Saffoo
This is a little nut-looking fruit with a thin brownish skin. It looks a bit like an oversized date. It’s boiled, and the thin skin is sucked off with the flesh, which is in a thinnish layer between the skin and the pit. I find the taste to be a cross between avocado and lime. These are more of a tasty treat than a useful fruit that we can get regularly, and they’re impractical for anything more than an infrequent indulgence.

- Tondolo
Little red fruits that I've never had. Apparently you eat the whitish inside, including the seeds, and it smells (but doesn't taste) like breakfast sausage.

- Cola nuts
Apparently there’s a cola nut tree along one of the trails in our forest, but I haven’t been down that trail yet. I wonder how easy it will be to get one of the fruits down.

- Glucose biscuits
Yeah, I know, these aren't fruits, but they're good snacks and they don't fit into any other group. We buy them in bulk in Kinshasa and consume a lot. They're portable, so mostly they're used as snacks while in the field on long days. The biscuits themselves are basically sweet little cookies that are probably intended for babies who are teething, in packs of 13.

SPICES/SEASONINGS
We have a few local seasonings, several regular imported staples that we use for seasoning, and a few imported spices that will serve to prepare just a couple of dishes each.

- Pili-pili
We’ve got two varieties of hot peppers. We grow tiny red ones at camp, and we get larger, juicier, green ones from the village. The green ones are similar to habaneros in appearance and hotness. Our tiny red ones are dryer and not quite as hot, but still pretty powerful if you get a whole one in a bite. Both varieties are prepared by mashing them up and mixing them with rock salt. We sprinkle the mixture over most things, we mix it into the greens, or we just dip the kwanga into the mixture for flavour.

- Lompidj
This is a green leafy herb. We ground it up with rock salt and pili-pili, and add it to most dishes for flavour. I guess the closest comparable flavour I know of would be fresh dill.

- Rock salt
We import this from Kinshasa. It’s worth a lot around here.

- Cane sugar
We import this from Kinshasa. It’s also worth a lot around here.

- Honey
We import this from Kinshasa, but apparently we can get local stuff too.

- Onions and garlic
We import this from Kinshasa. It’s my job to put them into the sun every day to keep them from getting too moist and going bad.

- Tomato paste
We import this from Kinshasa by the case of tiny little cans. It’s used in pretty much every dish we eat.

- Palm oil
We get this from the village. It’s thick, orange, and grainy, and probably not that healthy, but it tastes good. It congeals at about 20C, so it won’t even flow in the morning if the night was at all cool. It’s used in a number of dishes, and can be used to fry stuff.

- Vegetable oil
This is imported from Kinshasa and used for flavouring in a number of dishes.

- Imported seasonings
Black pepper
Mexican fruit seasoning
Curry powder
Garam masala
Cinnamon
Coriander
Turmeric
Herbes de Provence
Basil
Etc. (whatever people brought)


MEAT
The local population around here is a hunter society. In general, each village has a large stand of forest that is attributed to them, where they do their hunting and other resource gathering. There are also plenty of rivers where people do their fishing. In our case, the village of Lompole has basically ceded much of their forest to us, so the Lompole forest has become a study site rather than a hunting resource. There’s still a lot of Lompole forest (to the north of the Lokoro River) that isn’t part of the study site, so the villagers still eat plenty of local bushmeat. But we don’t purchase any of it. We need to remain clearly opposed to hunting, in order to maintain credibility when we request that the villagers not hunt in our study area.

We do, however, accept the fishing that goes on in the Lokoro. Our camp is just south of the Lokoro, and there are a few fishing villages along its length nearby. We have one resident fisherman at camp who is not paid a daily wage, but is paid by the kilogram of fish that he brings in for our immediate consumption. He also gets to benefit from the luxuries of living in our camp, vs. in a fishing village (free food, a complimentary daily cigarette, coffee with sugar, salt, plenty of hangout time with the other workers, etc.).

So our fresh meat supply consists solely of fish. In addition, we have smoked fish that’s produced locally, and we have canned stuff.

- Fresh fish
We’ve got quite a variety of species that appear every morning. Sometimes there are some big ones that can weigh four or five kilos (up to 10 pounds or so), while the majority are smaller. I guess the average daily haul is about 1.5kg, though it ranges from none on bad days to about 10kg on the best days. The workers’ staple is fish. The fish is pretty much always prepared by chopping it up and boiling it with tomato paste, salt, onion, and garlic. I find that it’s a pain in the ass to eat, because of all the tiny little bones to pick out. I sometimes forgo the fish entirely just so I don’t have to deal with picking out all the bones.

- Smoked fish
I think this stuff looks nasty, but it’s got similar nutritional qualities to the fresh stuff but it keeps longer. The meat is pretty shrivelled up inside though. At least the bones are decomposed sufficiently to chew through. It’s prepared identically to the fresh fish, but needs to boil longer to make it chewable. Smoked fish is probably the only thing we have, aside from peanuts, that requires actual chewing – everything else we eat is pretty much mush.

- Sardines
We import these by the case from Kinshasa. We bring a tin into the field on days we’ll be out for most of the day. We also use sardines to supplement the fish supply on days that the fisherman doesn’t bring much in.

- Corned beef
We import this from Kinshasa. This is also portable food for taking into the field on long days. Once we had it mixed up with beans and spices for dinner, sort of like chili. Corned beef isn’t something that’s particularly liked, but it’s practical.


BEVERAGES
We get our water from a local stream about four minutes down a trail, and filter it before drinking. We also use that water, put into buckets, for bathing in shower stalls at camp. There’s also another stream about five minutes further down the trail that we can go to, to actually bathe in. Both streams are about ankle-deep. The bathing one is also where our laundry is done.

- Water
Our drink selection consists of filtered water at the ambient temperature, or boiled water steeped with a few imported things:

- Coffee grounds
We get two brands imported from Kinshasa. The Bora Sana isn’t very good, while the Carioca Super Qualité Kinshasa is passable. We mix it with hot water and let the grounds settle at the bottom. We mix in sugar and milk powder, and it’s actually not that bad.

- Nescafé
This imported luxury doesn’t last the whole period between planeloads; it’s much tastier than the Carioca Super Qualité Kinshasa.

- Nesquik
The chocolate variety is clearly the most popular here, mixed with the boiled water and milk powder, but we also have the strawberry variety. I haven’t tried that. I think the pink colour just turns me off.

- Tea
We have Lipton bags with the yellow label. There are also a few other varieties around, that individuals brought. There’s a bit of green tea, for example.

- Milk powder
Just used as a base for Nesquik, or as an additive to coffee or tea.


COOKING INFRASTRUCTURE
All of our food is cooked over fire. The fire is built by placing the ends of long thick logs together, in a starburst pattern. As they get burned, the logs are pushed closer to the centre. The pot is balanced on the middle of the log starburst. If needed, a satellite fire is created in the same way with some of the smaller logs, but usually there is just one pot on at any given moment. There are rarely flames; the heat is mainly transmitted from red-hot embers on the ends of the logs. The ash is sometimes used to cook stuff in too.

There is a shelf above the fire, where smoked fish is stored and where kwanga is heated up. Shoes can also go there to dry, and the workers put their tobacco and cigarettes there to keep it dry. Fresh fish can be placed there to get smoked for longer-term storage.

There is a collection of pots for cooking in. No pans.

There’s a bucket for sorting through the fish guts.

There’s one ladle. I ordered another on the plane from Kinshasa.

There are a few knives. These are used for everything from peeling potatoes to chopping greens to opening cans of tomato paste. They get so much use that most have lost their handles, but they are still useful.

There’s a big mortar and pestle for mashing the greens or the peanuts or the mbika seeds. The pestle is made of a dugout log on a pedestal, and the mortar is like the butt end of a baseball bat.

All of our dishes are stainless steel. We always eat from bowls (no plates), with a small side plate for piling kwanga, pili-pili, or fish bones. We always have a spoon and a fork, but never a knife. Things just aren’t tough enough to need a knife. We each have a mug. That’s it.


RECIPE CHALLENGE
OK, now you know all of our food supplies here, and what we’ve got at our disposition to prepare it. We have two cooks working full-time to do the work, although my role is to come up with meals. So far, I just program what’s known. I’m open to suggestions though!

So, if anyone reading this finds that these ingredients and cooking implements would enable something more interesting than what we’ve got, please send us recipes. Check the ‘Communication’ blog entries for details on how to go about sending emails here, and include a bit of news from the outside world while you’re at it!

Thanks!