cooking class!

To add variety and fun to our hours of language helper sessions, we have started Wednesday morning Hausa cooking classes with our house helper! She doesn't speak English, so we are forced to converse completely in Hausa. Not only do we spend 4 hours learning Hausa...afterward we are rewarded with delicious, West African food (and we have learned some interesting Hausa food culture in the process).

The first week, we made "miya" which is a soup or sauce. It fed us for almost a whole week.

Last week, we made beans and rice. When T first suggested that we make beans and rice, I thought "how will that take 3 hours to make?" Well, I found out.

1. First, we sorted the beans, one by one, to remove the ones with bug damage. That step took about an hour...meanwhile I learned how to say many words "small bean, big bean, red bean, brown bean, we are sorting beans, etc."

sorted beans

2. Then, she simmered the beans in a pot on the stove until they had softened. She added a chunk of what looked like clay and we spent several minutes, in broken Hausa, trying to figure out what it was. Not salt. "Kanwa"- a word that is not in any dictionary we have. We had to ask our English-speaking language helper later that afternoon and found out....it's potash! I have never used potash before- so I turned to the internet to learn more.

Potash

Fun facts about Potash (from Wikipedia):
--The name derives from "pot ash", which refers to plant ashes soaked in water in a pot, the primary means of manufacturing the product before the industrial era.
--Potash is produced worldwide at amounts exceeding 30 million tons per year, mostly for use in  fertilizers.
--Potassium derives its name from potash, and was first derived by electrolysis of caustic potash, in 1808.
--In addition to fertilizer, potash is used to produce animal feed supplements, cement, fire extinguishers, food products, photographic chemicals,and textiles. It is also used in brewing beer, pharmaceutical preparations, and as a catalyst for synthetic rubber manufacturing.


3. We added rice to the beans and they finished cooking, perfectly. No burnt rice stuck to the bottom of the pan. No extra water or dried out rice. Moist, wonderful rice and beans...complete with a bit of a purplish coloring from the potash.

4. To top it off, we fried onions in peanut oil to put over the rice and beans. I think this was my favorite part. The onions were so tasty!

This is one of our favorite African dishes so far! So simple...but so delicious!

Stay tuned for our next cooking adventure: Yams and Sauce