Today, despite the bright sun, is chilly at 62°. The chill will stay around all day, but I don’t mind as I’m warm in my trusty sweater shirt and socks and have no inclination to go outside.

This morning I had my usual cups of coffee and I added toast. I don’t know why, but the toast reminded me of breakfast in Ghana. It was the same every morning, but I didn’t really mind. The water for my coffee and the eggs were cooked on a small round charcoal burner. The bread was toasted by leaning it around the burner. The eggs were fried in groundnut oil, peanut oil here. They were delicious. I’d also have another cup of coffee after teaching my first class. My house was on school grounds, a walk of a couple of minutes from the classroom block. I always went home between classes.

Lunch was fresh cut fruit: bananas, oranges, pineapple, pawpaw (papaya) and mango. That was the first time I tasted mango and papaya. Probably even the first time I ever saw them. The oranges were small, sweet and green. I remember mountains (slight exaggeration here) of oranges for sale in the market.

Dinner was generally beef but sometimes chicken. The beef was cooked for a while in a tomato sauce to help tenderize it, but you could also rub the beef with pawpaw, a natural tenderizer. I always had yam, mashed yam. I’d slather it with margarine, butter being an expensive import, as the yam was usually dry. I drank water at lunch and dinner.

For sweets, I could buy Cadbury chocolate bars or Tree bars from Ghana. I also used to buy Fan ice cream, a term used loosely here, in small triangular packages. They were sold by bike riding vendors with a freezer box on the front of their bikes. I also bought bofrot, sold by small girls from a wooden box with glass sides carried on their heads. The bofrot were puffy and round like a donut hole. They are still one of my favorite Ghanaian foodstuffs.

My all time favorites are jollof rice and kelewele. I never tired of them. On all trips back I did the same, eaten my fill as often as I could. On my last trip I think I had jollof rice every dinner.

This entry was posted on October 9, 2023 at 11:28 am and is filed under Musings. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.