Cooking and Eating!

April 17, 2012: Recipe Development

We spent our day at the Samaritan’s Purse building, working with some of the staff from the programs that will be distributing the herring. The sites, in Monrovia and Foya, do some incredible and much-needed work with orphans, vulnerable children, women, and people living with HIV. Our group consisted of thirteen exceptional women: some are cooks, others are program managers or directors. They all know their way around a Liberian kitchen.

Dee lent us her kitchen for the afternoon and set it up with all the ingredients we bought yesterday at Paynesville City Market. The kitchen consists of a small room with a sink and some shelves where she stores the dishes , a fridge and a sink. This opens onto an open air space separated from the outside by a chest-high wall. It has a simple two burner, charcoal fueled grill on which Dee cooks enough to feed the entire staff of about 100 every day at lunch.

Nina facilitated the cooking session and divided the participants into three groups which cooked “Herring with Sauce,” “Herring with Pumpkin,” and “Herring with Potato Greens.” All variations on local Liberian recipes. They sliced the onions thin. They chopped the pumpkin. They washed “piles” of potato greens, carefully put them in hand-sized bunches and one of the women shaved them super fine with a large flat blade knife, holding them right in her hand! Another put the hot peppers in a wooden mortar and pounded them with a long wooden stick. We asked if we could help pound the peppers, but they said it would hurt our eyes. Dee doesn't put as many hot peppers in her food every day because she says white peoples' stomachs can't handle it like the Liberians’ can...they like their food spicy!

The preparation went something like this: pour palm oil in a big pot, then add chopped pumpkin or finely shredded potato greens, mashed peppers and onions, then water. Simmer for a while to soften the vegetables and meld the flavors . Then gently fold in a whole bunch of herring.

Herring goes really well with Liberian cuisine, since they already cook with sardines and local fish sometimes. They say that fish can be expensive though, so it is good to have this donated herring for their beneficiaries. Spending my afternoon in a kitchen filled with Liberian women was just incredible. They sliced, diced and stirred, and chatted boisterously, in a steamy, hot, colorful, crowded kitchen. The final outcome was three delicious dishes which included the herring and all of the local ingredients.

When the cooks were done, Dee prepared a long table restaurant style as she called it - with big bowls of rice and the three Herring dishes for all the cooks to to eat. They had made enough for the whole group and some of the SP workers who had been toiling to fix a broken drain pipe on the other side of the kitchen wall. They had been watching and smelling the aromas wafting from the kitchen all afternoon. We had an impromptu focus group and rave reviews from all who shared the meal. Once again, my most memorable experiences here are marked by food!