Adventures in Foreign Cusine

[Warning: There’s a chance that reading this post could put you off your dinner. So either toughen up and read on or come back after you’ve eaten :) ]

As I mentioned at the end of my last post, after Tabaski, every Muslim family in Senegal eats meat for the next week at least. What I failed to point out when describing the butchering process though is that they do not throw ANYTHING away. Seriously…I think maybe one or two organs didn’t make the cut, but that’s it. That bucket of meat I mentioned my Mom sorting through? It contained everything from plain old meat on the bones to the liver, kidneys, intestines, testicles, etc. With this information in mind, I think you’ll all understand why I stuck to the vegetables and rice and avoided meat in the days following Tabaski.

Well about a week after Tabaski, I figured we had to be nearly done with the sheep and started to ease up on my cautious eating habits… mistake. We sat down for dinner that Thursday night and I was excited to see that dinner was rice and beans and NO meat! There was a weird stick-like thing wrapped in what looked like thick string sitting in the middle of the bowl, but I was tired and hungry and I didn’t think much of it. So I’m sitting there eating my fill and listening to my family jabber away in Wolof when something that they said made me take a second look at that stick in the bowl.

So I leaned forward and again tried to figure what the heck that thing was doing in my dinner. Unable to figure it out (or perhaps just in denial), I pointed at the stick and asked my Dad what it was. His response: “C’est les intestin, quoi.” Well even though I imagine most of you probably don’t speak French, that sentence doesn’t require much translation. Yeah, that “thick string” wrapped around the burnt piece of wood? Sheep’s intestines.

Cue me having a flashback to the day of Tabaski and watching our Mauritanian butcher-friend holding the intestines over a bucket and squeezing out their contents. YEAH… I tried to be cool and calm about it, but my family knows me better than that. So when I followed this revelation by immediately putting down my spoon and declaring I was full, they all burst into laughter and a lot of, “Oh Amy!”s. And though I was rather grossed out, I had to join them, thinking to myself, “Oh Africa!”

The following night, it was time for dinner and I sat down at the bowl again, feeling slightly apprehensive, but determined to forget the intestines-incident. The cover was lifted off the bowl to reveal a delicious smelling meat stew type dish and I thought to myself, “Yes!” So I grabbed my spoon and proceeded to dig in.

Well I was sitting there enjoying the delicious food and half-listening to my family’s conversation when my attention was once again drawn to the meat in the center of the bowl. It was clearly on some type of bone, which I found reassuring, but I couldn’t figure out what exactly it could be. I was just about to ask, when I heard my Mom mention something about “soup” and it reminded me of a story my LCF told us during training…
Back when PC Senegal used to put people with families in Thies instead of villages for training, there was one girl who went to her home stay on the first night and her family had really wanted to make her feel welcome by preparing an especially nice dinner. So they made soup. Sounds harmless enough, right? Wrong. This girl proceeds to sit down at the bowl, on what was probably only her fourth night in country, and the cover is lifted off to reveal…a sheep’s head sitting smack dab in the middle of the soup. Apparently the girl was so freaked out that she called Peace Corps and made them come get her and take her back to the center for the night.

Well you can probably imagine my reaction…in what was I’m sure extremely comical fashion, I stop with my spoon halfway to my mouth for another bite, have an internal “OH CRAP!” moment, point at the meat and say, “Soup?! Is that the…the head?!” Well my family, who were probably waiting the whole meal for me to figure it out, starts laughing and my Mom, ever so helpfully, turns the “meat” around so that I can see the EYE, which is still in the socket. She then proceeds to grab the eye with her hand, pull it out, and deposit it on the ground next to the bowl.

This time I didn’t even try to pretend like I could be cool with it…I immediately dropped the spoon and shoved my chair back from the bowl. This of course prompted my family to laugh even harder, some of them to the point of tears. I, while admittedly super grossed out, had to join in. I don’t think I’ll ever look at soup in the same way again…

These incidents, particularly the one with the head soup, have pretty much become a running joke around the Mane household. Usually at least once a week at dinner, my Dad and I have the following conversation:

Baay: Oh Amy, I was thinking we’d get a head to prepare for dinner sometime this week.
Me: Really? Shoot, I have to go to Kaolack this week.
Baay: Oh don’t worry, we won’t have it on the day you’re gone. What day do you have to go to Kaolack?
Me: Whatever day you plan on having head for dinner.
[Cue laughter and “Oh Amy!”s from the rest of the family.]

So there you have it….fun adventures in foreign cuisine. I hope you’re not too grossed out, but you can’t say I didn’t warn you. (And at least you didn’t eat the stuff!)

Tabaski 2009

On the morning of Tabaski, everyone was up early to start preparing all the food for the day. I asked what I could do to help and was given a huge bowl of onions to dice. (Onions are a major ingredient in a lot of Senegalese dishes.)

I’ve never claimed to be much of a culinary genius, but before arriving in Senegal I’d say I was fairly confident in my abilities to at least cut up onions. Not so much here. The women here don’t use cutting boards, or even sharp knives. Rather they take a (usually) dull knife, place the onion in the palm of their hands, and proceed to dice it up in their hand. In the past when I’d offered to cut up the onions, no one let me…I think they were worried I’d hurt myself. I wasn’t quite confident I could do it either, but I decided to give it a go. Well I made it thru about ½ an onion before my eyes started watering so badly that I nearly cut my finger off. Needless to say, they promptle took that job away from me. I’m pretty sure they’ll never let me near onions again, but at least we all got a good laugh out of it.

Still trying to make myself useful, I volunteered to pound the pepper instead. My Mom and sisters looked at me skeptically for a minute, but then they seemed to decide that was a task I could handle without injuring myself. So I sat myself down in front of the big mortar and pestle and started pounding away.

About an hour and an absurd amount of ground pepper later, my arms were starting to get rather sore. [You don’t even realize what a blessing pepper mills (or pre-ground pepper for that matter) are!] At this point my Dad walks out and announces that its time to kill the sheep… and I took that as my cue to escape for a shower. Watching them slit the sheep’s throat? No thank you!

After showering and donning my new, slightly clown-like dress, I headed back into the courtyard. Thankfully, the killing part was over, but the sheep was still laying in the sand, bleeding into a hole. Once it had bled out completely, what did they do with said hole and all the blood? Cover it up with some sand and move on with the day. Yep, super sanitary.

And then the fun really began… the Mauritanian guy showed up to butcher the sheep. In our yard. (Usually the head of the family does it, but my Dad hired this guy instead.) I would have gladly excused myself at this point, but there was no way my family was letting me out of watching. So, I grabbed my camera instead and prepared to observe from a safe distance.

I’ve already posted pictures of some of the butchering process here, but allow me to tell you about my favorite part… The first thing that had to be done was to get the skin off. In order to do this, the guy cut a whole in the skin on the sheep’s leg and literally proceeded to blow the animal up like a balloon. Yep, that’s right…a sheep-shaped balloon. But the real kicker? While I’ve heard from other PCVs that their Dads used bike pumps, etc. to accomplish this task, our guy used his MOUTH! I was a bit dumbfounded. If you look closely at the pictures, you can see the guy with his mouth on the sheep’s leg as the animal gradually inflated. Yuck.

Well after that shocker, the butchering proceeded as you’d imagine it would. My family certainly enjoyed themselves laughing at how uncomfortable I was while watching the whole process. It was especially fun when the butcher started advancing towards me holding the sheep’s recently decapitated head in front of his face like a mask. This experience just confirmed for me that I infinitely prefer the American way of doing things…aka the meat arrives at the supermarket in neat little packages and bears almost no resemblance to the animal/animal parts that it came from.

Once the butchering part was finished, my Mom and sisters took over again. First, they grabbed the liver and threw it on the fire. Then they took the laundry basin full of everything else and started dividing it up. Some we’d eat later that day, some went in the freezer, and some we gave away.

Next up? A mid-morning snack of liver fried with onions and potatoes, yum! Thankfully, they gave my Dad and I a separate plate and, since he pays much less attention to what I eat than my Mom and sisters, I was able to eat around the liver without getting any grief. I’ve tried more new foods than I can count since getting to Senegal, but I don’t really feel like liver needs to be one of them.

Well after all the excitement of the morning, the day definitely settled down. We ate another meat-tastic lunch, took our post-lunch naps and then everyone got decked out in their new outfits. (I, being far too cheap/poor to buy a second new outfit for the day, put on my complet from Swear-in again.)

A big part of Tabaski celebrations is going around to visit people and asking their pardon for any faults you might have committed against them over the past year. Also, all the kids run around from house to house showing off their new clothes. It’s kind of like trick-or-treating, but people give out coins instead of candy. So, after all the kids in my family took off, Yaay, Baay (Dad) and I piled into my Dad’s ancient Peugeot to make our rounds.

And that was pretty much it for the big day. After visiting 6 or 7 houses, we headed back home, ate some more meat, and I passed out. Over the next couple of days, visitors continued to come and go from the house to ask my family’s pardon. We also ate a ridiculous amount of sheep and all I can say is thank goodness my family can afford refrigeration! Regardless of whether a family has a refrigerator, they continue to eat meat for days after Tabaski, and I’m sure I would’ve gotten a major case of food poisoning.

And on that lovely note…ba bennen!