Food, Glorious (?!) Food

Banku, with tilapia fish and red and green chilli pepper sauce

Ghanaian food is quite simple- you can have plain rice, jollof rice (spicy rice in tomato sauce), chicken-with-rice or fish-with-rice. The small fish is called tilapia and arrives on the plate fully intact with head, tail and sometimes an eye or both looking up at you. The portions of rice are HUGE, enough to feed a small family, and at first when I didn't finish even half the plate my colleagues were very concerned that I was sick or about to fade away- definitely not the case. 

Yum!

If, for some strange reason you don’t want rice that day, you can choose banku (lumps of fermented corn maize) or kenkey (bigger, more sour lumps of corn maize wrapped in corn leaves) or fufu (a gooey pulped ball of crushed yam or cassava served in a soup). These have to be eaten using your right hand to pick bits off the lumps and dip them in the sauce- it is frowned upon to use cutlery or your left hand. The chilli pepper sauce comes in green, red and black with varying levels of hotness, even the mildest of which makes my eyes stream, my tongue burn and my face turn chilli-red. My colleagues at work advised me to ask for gravy as a sauce with my lunch since I clearly can’t handle the hardcore stuff- so I was happily anticipating some Bisto-style goodness. But no, this was not gravy as we know it. Ghanaian ‘gravy’ has the texture of minced meat and still tastes spicy, but I’ve learned to love it - anything to relieve the plainness of rice.  While I'm enjoying the culinary experimentation, I do miss having a plain old cheese sandwich for lunch.

Such a foreigner drinking the coconut milk from a glass!

Visitors are advised to avoid eating salad here unless you’ve bought and chopped it yourself because it could have been washed in dirty water that will cause you to turn cross-eyed, your limbs to fall off and/or die a horrible death. The fresh fruit here is amazing and so cheap from the stalls lining the streets. They have juicy pineapples, oranges (which are green), mangoes, watermelons, guavas and the ubiquitous plantain (from the banana family). You can have the plantain fried, baked, boiled, sliced, as crisps, sweet or savoury; all taste delicious. At lunch time, we get coconuts from a guy with a wheelbarrow full of them; he chops the top off with a machete so we can drink the milk, then use the top to scrape out the husk to eat. 

When we go out for dinner, the service is inevitably slow and chaotic. Several items we try to order from the menu are ‘out’ that day. A request like no olives in the salad or no corn on the pizza will be forgotten/ignored. They don’t bother attempting to bring everyone’s food around the same time. Even though they write down the order, someone’s food or drink always gets lost, meaning another 30-40 minute wait. On one occasion, two of us went to get lunch at a quiet hotel restaurant. I ordered an omelette and my friend ordered a hamburger. More than half an hour later, the waiter appeared with one plate- it was a burger bun with egg in the middle. We were starving and not impressed. 'This is Africa' is the catch-all refrain to excuse such things. 

The most fun is trying to pay the bill- No-one in Ghana EVER has change for any denomination, so if you try to use a 20 cedi note to pay for something that costs 12 cedis, they will huff and puff and disappear for ages to scrape together the coins from somewhere. The bill will often contain different prices to those on the menu. When we query this, the waitress will vaguely answer “Oh, that was the old menu, it’s changed…” The stress of organising all this would drive us to drink, if it weren't for the fact that ordering a drink would mean repeating the whole rigmarole all over again!