All you want to know about great eats in Guinea

Now that I have been in Guinea a year, I think that I have tried most of their eats. The most important meal of the day, is of course dinner. If a family has the means, they will eat some baguette bread dipped in local brewed tea for breakfast. I rarely see my family cook lunch or eat a proper lunch. Instead they will just boil some sweet potatos when they get back from working in the field at about 2pm.

Breakfast

Every village has about 2 or 3 bakery. The bakery is a large version of brick oven that we see in some pizza restaurant close to the size of minivan. Don't get too excited, the only bread they bake is baguette, anything more fancy than that is probably too cost prohibitive and villagers can't afford to buy it. Guinean like to eat bread dipped in tea, or if they can afford it, they like to spread mayonnaise or butter over it (but that's rare for an average family to buy a bottle of mayonnaise to eat at home themselves). I know what you are thinking, eeww, mayonnaise, so unhealthy. I thought of that, too, but after checking the label and seeing the proteins listed, and considering how protein deprived they are and how little fat they get in their diet, and how much physical labor they put out daily, mayonnaise is probably good for them instead of for us Americans who sit on our ass all day, have four wheels for our legs and have all the option of food at our fingertips.

Another breakfast item that I have grown to love is guinean porridge. Guinean women make tiny flour ball size of lentil, cook them in water with sugar and lemon juice for a long time, so it becomes creamy like the consistency of runny hot cereal. It is sweet with a hint of sourness. I love to buy some fresh fried flour dough (golf ball size), break them into small pieces and put in the porridge to eat together. The taste reminds me of chinese fried bread stick in hot soybean milk that I grew up eating. Most of time the porridge is made with cassava (yuca in spanish, manioc in french) flour, sometimes rice flour or corn flour. A new varity that has hit our market is rice porridge mixed with peanuts. My new favorite.

So, that's the two types of local breakfast you would find people in the village eat, there is a third type of breakfast with all local ingredients, but you will only find it at the white person's house (yes, that's me, all non-blacks are consider white to guineans), that's baguette with fresh grinded organic non-sugar added local peanut butter and local made honey, simply divine. But, I can't seem to get the local to agree with me on the taste, all us volunteers love it. It is probably too much of a luxury to eat peanut butter this way for guineans.

When you are in a big town, then you can find omelet sandwich also for breakfast which is scrambled eggs with onions and tomatos sandwiched in a baguette.

Lunch & Dinner
There are three main "dishes": Rice w/ sauce, Toa, and Fonio that you will find being prepared in guinean daily life.

Rice w/ sauce: one stable in guineans diet and can be found at home or in restaurant. There are peanut sauce, leaf sauce, eggplant sauce, okra sauce, bean sauce, and soup sauce. The sauce are poured over a bowl of rice and depend on the portion of rice, it can be served to 1 or 10 person. Almost all the sauce has the common ingredient of dried fish, maggie cube (the equivalent of a mixture of chicken bouillion and seasoning of instant noodle), onions and tomatos.

Peanut sauce of course, is based on locally made peanut butter, if one doesn't skimp on the peanut butter, it is very delicious.

Leaf sauce are typically made with cassava leaf, according to "Where There is No Doctors"(a book us volunteer take to our village for self diagnose, a very handy book at times, othertimes, it just make me think I have all kinds of diseases), is a great source of protein. I find the texture of cassava leaf grainy and dry, not a personal favorite. Then there is sweet potato leaf sauce, added with a little bit of okra to make the texture a bit slimmy and smooth, which is much easier to swallow. I take sweet potato leaf sauce over cassava leaf sauce anyday. The last is boroboro (let's just call it guinean wild spinach) leaf sauce. It is a barely edible grass that pop out everywhere. My host mom only cook it when she doesn't have 5 cents to buy other leaves, and of course when you can't afford the better leaves, you are usaully low on dried fish and seasoning, so needless to say, I've never had a good boroboro leaf sauce. Although I like cooking it with tomatos and eggs the few times I had instant noodles.

The leaves are chopped to really tiny fine piece and boiled for a long time with other ingredients before it is ready. Guinean kitchen knives are so dull, like our butter knife, so it is no danger to guinean when they hold a bundle of leaves in the hand and chopping it in their palm. Guineans don't use chopping board. Their palm is their chopping board.

Eggplant and Okra sauce are done in a similar way like leave sauce where vegetables are chopped to very small pieces and cooked for a long time until it is mushy. It is also a more expensive sauce to make, probably why I never find them in "restaurants". Toward the summer, I've started to make these two types of sauce once a week for my family. Yep, you guess it, they are my favorite sauce for my rice.

Toa: before I can explain to you what a toa is, I should explain to you what cassava is. Cassava is a woody shrub with starchy tuberous root. Very important carbohydrate staple to Guineans, especailly with the ever increasing prices for rice. The leaves like I've said before can make leaf sauce. The root has a brown tree bark like skin, and the inside is kind like sugar cane. The guineans eat it raw, or after it has been cooked in water. They also dry a lot of them, so later on they can grind them to flour to eat it throughout the year. Flour are milled by pounding a baseball bat sized pestle into a waist high wooden mortar.

I tried many times to do it at my village, they always laugh and think it is the funniest thing that a white person is doing hard manual labor. The pestle is not light. It weighs somewhere between 10 to 15 lbs. Try to lift that up and down for an hour many days a week. No wonder everyone here is very muscular. They never let me do it for too long because to them I can never do it perfectly and they don't want me to roughen my hands. Okay, back to Toa, Guineans cook cassava flour with water to a thick liquid rice pudding like consistency and eat it with peanut butter based watery sauce. The whole thing is sandy color. I never seem to get enough sauce to wash down toa, not a easy thing to swallow. It taste as bad as it sounds, except when the sauce is made with a lot of peanut butter which is rare. I am eating toa at least 3 times a day now, as rice is getting harder and harder for my family to afford. Toa also is not found in "restaurants", my guess is they are too cheap to be sold.

Fonio: I like this even less than toa. It is usually dry and kind of sandy. Fonio is a really small millet that is first painstakingly removed from the plant by stumping on it, then the husk is seperated by pounding the grain in the mortar. Since the the grain of fonio isn't much larger than that of sand, it is really hard to get all the husks out.

Another meal that is usually reserved for special guests, but can be highly lethal to those who have not developed a strong stomach to all the unknown foreign bacterias, is the locally produced cottage cheese over corn meal or rice with a pinch of salt or sugar (in my case when I visited my students in far away villages).

Snacks: besides cheaped candies and gums from china and stale cookies from really I never cared to find out where, I prefer the local snacks like fried flour dough of ping-pong ball size, roasted peanut, broiled peanut, fried sweet potato, fried plantain, homemade caramel candy, and roasted corn.

Beverage: Bissup rocks! made from hibiscus flower, mostly sweet with a hint of sourness. It comes in a plastic bag half size of a sandwich bag, cinched with knot on top. Sink your teeth to a corner of the bag and suck, and when you are done, you will say, "ah, got to get another one!" There is also drinkable yogurt in a bag. It is not as sweet as yogurt in America and taste much more original. There is also ginger juice drink in a plastic bag. It is basically just ginger boiled in water added with sugar.

Fruits:
I am in the middle of orange season. My host sister picked about 50 oranges to for me to bring to Conakry. I guess that's what they do when they go to the city. Well, for a good reason, here 5 oranges can cost 2 000 FG (guinea franc), and they aren't even all that sweet, where at my village, 5 nicely riped orange cost only 500 FG. Voici, la difference! Another very important point to make is, here, we drink our orange not eat them. The green or yellow hard skin of an orange is peeled off like you would to an apple,leaving the white interior softer skin, then you would slice off a small piece on top, exposing the "meaty" part of orange, then you just suck on it, siphoning all the juice out of it,
the cows and goats love the what's left of the orange after you've drank all the juice out, they tend to stand near you and "stare" you while you are drinking an orange. Voila, how we get fresh squeezed orange juice at our side of the world. 100% natural, fresh squeeze (by you) and absolutely no sugar added! (not to mention sugar is expensive here).

Mango season rolls in around June. There are so many mangos then, like the oranges in the orange season, many suffer the feat of falling off their trees and rot on the road.