Food Pt I - The Starch

Right its finally here, the often promised and never delivered blog on the Nigerian culinary extravaganza. This will be divided into two parts, this part is an homage to starch. Ask for what food is available in a Nigerian restaurant (or chop house in the local parlance) and you will be given a list of the available starch, no further explanation is necessary.

Typical beside the road 'chop house'

There are many places which serve Nigerian cuisine, they range from upmarket air-conditioned restaurants which remind me of a kind of bling version of McDonalds to a lady by the side of the road with a cool box. Price is normally inversely proportional to tastiness and directly proportional to the probability of bowel problems in the hours afterwards. I think this is mainly due to turnover, the women with coolers normally have to sell out within an hour or two of opening up, whereas at a proper restaurant the food can sit there for days and still be re-heated by enthusiastic if olfactory ly challenged staff.

One other thing to note about Nigerian food is the temperature, even breakfast here is served with ground dried hot peppers (called peppe) up north the amount of peppe added to food is manageable (for someone who like madras), but every so often you get a land mine which can blow your mouth off. Like many things in Nigeria food is something that should be approached with caution and the ground either carefully prodded first or follow in someone else’s footprints to avoid nasty surprises.


Following on from the format of the wildly successful drinks post I give you…. Starch:

Pounded yam

Pounded yam:

The undisputed king of the Nigerian starch based hierarchy, ask any Nigerian their favorite food (a more common question than you would have thought) and the answer for ALL men and most women is pounded yam. All households have somewhere a yam pounding mortar and pestle (a novel use of such a device to prop up a car is provided for illustration purposes only). To prepare your yam you must get dry yam (new rainy season yam is too wet apparently) boil it (err.. .didn’t you just say it had to be dry???), once soft you just wack it in your novelty giant mortar and pestle and pound away to your hearts content.

Most of the time no knife or forks will be provided and the accompanying soup or stew (for soup read stew and the stew is more like a spicy tomatoes soup) is eaten by rolling the yam into balls/shovel shapes then scooping the stew up with the resulting sculpture.




Other lump based starch:
Semovita - yellowy lump based starch made from corn flour at a guess.
Gari  - Like pounded yam but sticks to your fingers more, less flavour too.
tuwo schincafa (Stirred rice) - Rice but beaten to a pulp, then formed into balls. Its pretty good actually and most importantly is the only way to consume rice if you don’t want to also consume half a gallon of palm oil.

Yam Porridge
This is my favorite kind of starch, amazing considering its not normally served with meat. Its boiled yam which has been fluffed a little bit with a stew of beans and served with spicy palm oil based sauce. Looks disgusting, tastes great and a huge plate is only 30p

Jallof rice
This is a Nigerian staple, the wikipedia article for Jallof rice sums up the dish quite nicely:
“The most common basic ingredients are: rice, tomatoes and tomato paste, onion, salt, and red pepper. Beyond that, nearly any kind of meat, vegetable, or spice can be added.”

You can safely omit “nearly” before “any kind of meat”.

Also they have omitted one major ingredient, palm oil, lots of it. Rice here is not complete until it’s been thoroughly greased up.

Any form of rice must be cooked on an industrial scale in giant comedy caldrons, which do have the effect of making any group of women chefs look like the coven of witches who decided that black was so last year and floral oranges were a better summer look.





 


Street Food

Kosee
In all parts of Kaduna you can buy deep fried bean cakes on the side of the road, these have the advantages of being cheap and pretty much safe (nothing survives boiling oil) but you do have to start your day with deep fried food and pepe

Moi-Moi
These are similar to kosee except the bean cakes are boiled rather than fried, also for some bizarre reason certain evil people stuff crayfish in the mix so the whole thing tastes and looks like boiled vomit.

Corn
From March to August you can get bbqed sweet corn, which is similar but dryer and tougher than western sweet corn. Like many shops in Nigeria they tend to clump into groups so that at some roadsides you will see 4 or 5 women in a row, proving there is comfort in numbers, if perhaps not profit.

Also available are fried yam, sweet potatoe etc etc, if you can put it in oil and it contains starch you can more or less buy it on the streets of nigeria.


Right that’s It for now I leave you with a cute picture of the kitten and some video of an idiot being forced to dance for the Hausa people… who ever he is he didn’t get to keep any of the money and is very angry about this.

Transport

Transport in the uk is dull. When we set out on a journey there will normally be some form of timetable and if taking a car you can have a moderate idea by dividing the distance by the speed on a motorway and adding a bit for traffic etc. Transport in Nigeria is much more interesting, not only do you get the fun of negotiating the price you also get the simple joys of not know where you’ll arrive or the people you will meet on the way.

The main forms of transport can be divided down into the following types: motor bikes, bush taxis, buses, private cars and lorries.

In the developed world the judicious application of laws, safety standards and courtesy disappointingly hold back the full potential of transport. Nigerians are not limited by such problems, a car is only full when there are 3 people in the front, 4 people in the back plus enough animals to make Noah proud and a boot full of yams, all this in a golf.

Roads:

Roads in Nigeria range from quite good duel carriageways to impassable streams of mud. The most dangerous roads are the good ones. Nigerians have fully embraced the digital revolution; accelerators have two settings on and off. In Birmingham it took years and months of computer modelling to design a traffic flow system which utilised the most number of lanes in the direction of rush hour, Nigerians do it by instinct.

Okadas
Motorbike taxis are apparently named after a defunct airline, which pretty accurately sums up their potential. There is a factory in china which must churn these 75cc machines out by the million, they are the cheapest way of going from a to b, and normally the quickest through traffic.

An okada can carry almost anything, a family, 20 chickens and their eggs. One of the other volunteers had their double bed mattress delivered from across town on the back of one of these bad boys .


Apparently they cost around £500, which is pretty much a bargain.An okada can carry almost anything, a family, 20 chickens and their eggs. One of the other volunteers had their double bed mattress delivered from across town on the back of one of these bad boys.




Okada drivers are also proud of their uniform, despite 40 degree heat they will always be wear at least a jumper, preferably some form of ski wear. My favourite was a guy in French 70’s style pink and luminous yellow shell suit onesy, unfortunately i don’t have a photo.

For all the amusing things you can say about okadas , they are cheap, relatively safe (as they cant go that quickly) and can go places where even 4x4’s get stuck. Out in the villages they are the only form of transport, and provide an important way of rural farmers to gain access to markets for their goods.

Buses:

In Kaduna Toyota mini-buses act as the predominate form of transport along its north south main road. They are cheap, packed and sweltering. The minibuses seat 10 passengers (4,4,2) a driver and a conductor. The bus fare as with all things in Nigeria depends on time of day, wind direction, moon phase and mood of conductor but ranges between 40-70N (15-30p). These buses also form a great way to interact with the local community as everyone below those who can afford their own car gets them and are normally surprised to see white people getting them and pretty chatty. They are also a great place to watch the occasional Nigerian amateur boxing match.

Bush taxis:

Bush taxi’s are just cars which run intercity motorpark to motorpark, there is no timetable you tunr up to the motorpark (every town has one or two) fend of the various people who grab you and try and push you into their car, find a car advertising the appropriate destination, negotiate the price and then wait for all the seats to fill up then the car goes. It sounds like a lot of hassle but once you get used to the system its actually pretty easy and allows quick and cheap if not comfortable travel.

The key advantage of bush taxi’s is the lack of hassle on the road, at police checkpoints and other miscellaneous roadblocks the drivers will simply drop N20 (10p) and sail through. They also seem to operate some form of union system which will send a new car from the nearest motorpark if your car has a serious breakdown (broken axel or better).

Private cars

These are both the safest and most dangerous way to get about. Safest in that you control the speed and maintenance standards but dangerous in that you are most likely to get stopped and have your car/papers etc ‘inspected’ by police or just have your car stopped until you pay the operators of the roadblock an amount of money (anything from N100 to N20,000).

Lorries:

Move large amounts of stuff from a to b, the more stuff the better and the more careless the driving the better.

Train

There is a train which runs from one end of Kaduna to the other, I regularly overtake it in the bus. There is supposed to be an ‘intercity’ train which runs the 150km to Kafanchan in the south of Kaduna, it takes 6 hours but apparently does serve beer. I’ll report back on this magical means of transport soonish!

Cows:

I was once stopped on the M25 for 2 hours because some cows had got loose on the carriageway. Not much chance of that happening here, the Fulani use roads as convenient ways to get cows to market and to the various rubbish piles which urban cows feed on. It makes an okada trip much more interesting if you have to weave through an oncoming herd.

Here are some other amusing photos of Nigerian transport in its many forms:

Aplogies about the length as usual, however you haven’t had an update in a while so thought you would all be able to handle a biggie.