The Divine Comedy for Vegetarians

The other day Mus returned home from town, all smug and excited, to inform me that he had bought a deer from a hunter. He said he was so excited about it, he had called his mom while he was still buying the deer and told her he would bring her some the next time he came to Accra. She laughed at him. I did, too. He's like the housecat who proudly lines up mice on your doorstep, happily bringing home the bacon.

He was so excited I had to go and take a peek. This “deer” was a small antelope the size of a farm rabbit, and he'd stuffed the whole thing in a sack and put it in our tiny, RV-sized freezer. It didn't even fill the whole freezer.

Mus, who has been hunting before, could easily have dressed the game himself. But only a few days earlier, Wasila, a 13-year-old girl we live with, had been bragging about how she was so good a dressing game. So Mus decided to give her the chance to show her stuff. And she lived up to it. She decided the game was too small to skin, so she singed the fur off (I left for this part, knowing full well what that would smell like). Still, I wondered, do we skin rabbits before eating them? I feel like we do.

I told the family about how many American kids have never killed an animal themselves, or helped skin an animal, or even been around a dead animal (short of roadkill, I guess). They laughed so hard at that idea. I think it's kind of sad, really. I recently read “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” by Barbara Kingsolver and in the book, she talks about how, during her years as a city dweller, some of the neighborhood kids would come and see her gardening, and be amazed that vegetables grow in dirt. They thought the idea was disgusting! It makes you wonder if Americans can get any further from the origins of our food. Our relationship with our lunches needs some serious counselling.

In that spirit, I'm going to show you a few pics of Wasila dressing the deer. Vegetarians be warned- some of the photos may make you gag. Anyway, the long and short of the process was she singed the skin, then gave the whole animal a bath in soapy solution (they were going to eat the skin, too) and then they gutted the deer and roasted the meat. I tried a bite of it and was amazed that the meat was not red meat, like venison at home, but white and very similar in taste and texture to poultry. It was pretty tasty- I'm usually not one for bushmeat, as they call wild game here, because I worry about it's freshness. In fact, I'm really not one for meat at all here, come to think of it. But Mus bought the deer freshly killed.

Wasila is singeing off the fur- smelly!

We roast it awhile...

Then she gives it a good bath, before gutting it and roasting the meat.


Here's the finished product- sorry for the cliche, but it really looked and tasted like chicken!

Now, before I continue, I should say that I am not an actual vegetarian. I enjoy vegetarian food, and I eat more like a vegetarian here than most actual vegetarian obrunis that I come across. I am a conscientious objector to factory farmed animals and would eventually like to get myself out of the CAFO food chain, but I don't morally object to meat. The little guy we roasted the other day, for example, lived a perfectly natural little antelope life, gallivanting through the rain forest like a Disney movies (if that's the mental picture you have of life in the wild, I'll let David Attenborough tackle that preconception) until he died a quick death when he fell to predation and entered the food chain. And as all animals must consume other life forms in order to live (hey plants are living beings, too, man), I'm okay with eating Bambi. Since I don't recall anyone giving me the option of being a plant or one of those sulfur-eating bacteria, I have no qualms about eating other life forms. I have no say in my biological make-up, and I can't imagine it's bad karma to eat to survive.

But for those of you cringing out there, there are wonderful vegetarian options here too. Just the other day Mr. Yacobo returned from his farm carrying wild mushrooms! He gave us two giant mushrooms which Mus cooked in groundnut (peanut) soup.

That said, I have to say that I'm really excited about another new food source- TOFU! I'm one of those weird non-vegetarians who love tofu. The family we live with makes really good, fresh tofu (turns out, the processing to make tofu is more simple than making cheese.) They've been selling it around Obo and it's going fast!

And since it's fresh, it turns out way better than the tofu I've bought at home. Yesterday I made really yummy curried noddles with tofu.

Here's the process by which tofu is made...

First, you take soybeans to the mill, where they have machine that grinds the soybeans into a paste. Then you ad water to the paste and mix it until it becomes a thick liquid.

Then you take the liquid and you strain it. The thin liquid collected in the bucket is soy milk.

The solids that are caught in the strainer are husks- they get tossed out to the chickens (or some people make stew out of them).

Then you boil the soy milk until it curdles on the top.

Next you collect the curds floating on the top.

You strain the curds.

After collecting the curds in a cotton sack, you press all the extra water out.

This is what the loose curds in the sack look like.

Then you press down firmly for a long time to compact the curds into tofu.

Meanwhile, the chickens investigate the discarded water, hoping to find little bits of tofu to snack on.

Isn't it beautiful?

25 Random Things About Me

This is a posting going around Facebook right now and I thought I would post mine here as well. These are 25 random things you might not know about your beloved Jess.

1. I hate cheesecake.
2. I am unable to snort- you know, to make a sound like a pig.
3. When I was a kid I was considered bold and talkative. Since reaching adulthood, I get shyer every year.
4. I have malaria as I type this.
5. I love intellectual discussion about religion, God, spirits, the nature of the universe... I read my old religion college textbooks in my free time around here. I should have double majored in anthropology and religion.
6. Birds tend to pick on me.
7. I eat more vegetables and less meat in Ghana than most obruni vegetarians I meet. I, however, do not consider myself a vegetarian. But I love tofu.
8. I don't match my socks. To each other, that is.
9. When I was four years old, my older brother taught me how to read and do simple arithmetic so I could do his homework. Worked for awhile, but then our parents caught on.
10. I am embarrassed to admit that after 5 years of spending winters in Ghana, my Twi is very poor. It's not until you move out of the Romance languages that you really get the feel for what learning a “foreign” language is like.
11. I am allergic to mangoes and black pepper.
12. My number one childhood fear was demon possession.
13. I went to an African herbalist to get relief from my migraines. I know the herbs work for scientific reasons, but man, this medicine works like magic.
14. My childhood nickname was “Messy Jessy.”
15. If I had a bird feeder, I would sit and watch the squirrels and chase the birds away.
16. Wilhelm Dafoe hit on me when I was fifteen years old.
17. I need 9 hours of sleep every night to be a healthy and stable human being.
18. When I was a small child, I used to daydream that one day I would travel to Africa during a big drought, and I would kneel on a big balcony before a crowd and pray for rain, and it would start raining and I would dance with thousands of people in the rain.
19. I currently live in a place in Africa where it rains almost every other day right now, and while I don't encounter thousands of people here, I did dance in the rain with three other people the other day. It was nice, and no prostration was required.
20. I love the Buttered Popcorn Jelly Belly's. This makes me an excellent friend to share jelly beans with.
21. I've only been in one fist fight (so far). I was about 11, he was an older boy, and it ended when he ran away crying.
22. My mind, when left to its own devices, is a fairly dark place. I'm trying to change that.
23. I've been known to lose things. Like my keys. Or my wallet. Or a whole slew of my friends' bathing suits.
24. I have recently discovered that I enjoy cooking.
25.One spring I spent my afternoons playing softball in the backyard with Grandma Schiller. I was sad because I was always picked last for softball at recess, so Grandma offered to help me (in between cleaning the whole house, doing the laundry, and cooking us dinner, of course).

On the Prowl

">I've been informed our high-security house has been breached. You see, as with many homes in Ghana, many residents of Obo construct their houses with iron bars over the windows (and sometimes reinforcing the doors), such as I've only seen in the “less desirable” neighborhoods in San Antonio. They turn your house into an unbreachable fortress, which can be a bit unnerving; makes you think that violent crime is rampant in this country.

If you walked up to a house in the middle of the night in Obo, chances are, you would find the door unlocked.

This lackadaisical attitude backfired on us, I have to say. Not only were we negligent about locking the door; some nights we forgot to shut the door entirely. And well-

We had a cat burglar visit us.

First, he licked all the crumbs off the floor. Then, he jumped up on the counters and overturned some of the dishes, including some food the family had been preparing to sell the next morning.

Then, the feline made off with all of the meat he could grab, except for what was safely locked up in the fridge, since his little paws couldn't manage the latch without opposable thumbs.

But, you'll be happy to know, we have learned our lesson. No more free meals for the vagrant neighborhood riffraff. At least not in our kitchen.