We started our adventure into the culture of Africa with cooking! First up on the menu was joloff rice from Nigeria, or simply western Africa depending on what you read (http://www.geniuskitchen.com/…/west-african-jollof-rice-445…). If you read through the ingredients listed in this link, you’ll notice pretty quickly that there will be a spice factor. I toned the spice down a bit for my 8 year old twin boys…who tend to complain if there’s the slightest bit of spice added to their meals. However, I spiced up my own bowl.
Our side item for the jollof was fufu. Fufu is a mix of Bisquick and potato flakes. You stir them up, separate the mix into balls, and served. Or at least I think that’s right. Here’s the recipe: http://www.geniuskitchen.com/recipe/fufu-198020. We may have royally messed up. I’m not really sure. We didn’t really COOK the fufu…just heated it up while stirring. I looked up a couple of recipes and didn’t see anything about “cooking it to a golden brown” or anything. So, fufu is basically potato flake dough… Whether we messed up or not, our potato flake dough was pretty darn good.
As I was going through the grocery store, picking up ingredient after ingredient for the jollof, I checked the rice aisle. Zatarain’s has a “Dirty Rice Mix” that is a great jumping off point towards jollof rice as it has quite a few of the ingredients already in its mix. So, I put back probably 6 of the ingredients I’d already found and considered this a monetary win.
My wife and I cooked all of it up in a pot when I returned home. Let me say, I think this project, intended for the kids, will be fun for us as well! We cook…I mean REALLY cook sometimes, but often we do easy cooking instead: packaged dinners, meat and veggies, microwave dinners… But, we don’t usually make things with so many ingredients. Jollof turned out wonderfully. Throw everything in a pot and cook. It was that easy, I think it’d be hard to mess up. It was also extremely tasty, I’m getting a bit hungry now just thinking about it.
We paired our jollof rice with an evening of movies. We watched Lion King, which my boys had of course already seen numerous times, and Beasts of No Nation.
Lion King is Lion King, you know? One of the best Disney movies of all time. Beasts of No Nation was a different story… My goal is to really add an aspect of education into this yearlong culture trek through the world.
I want to teach my boys the customs, history, and realities of places we’re learning about. I have two fears with this mission.
1. The historical documentaries will bore my twins senseless. While they loved Planet Earth and AMC’s The American West (which was more of a docudrama), I’m not quite sure what they’ll think of true documentaries. So, you’ll notice many of the ones I’ll use throughout the project are shorter documentaries I’ve found on YouTube.
The jury is still out on how the kids will react.
2. Some of the places we’ll “visit” have some harsh realities. For educational purposes, I want the boys to know about these…within reason. While I want to skip the sugar coating and show those realities, I feel I’ll need to censor some scenes. Beasts of No Nation proved my theory to be accurate. My boys were transfixed by the story of Agu, who was taken from his village and forced to join a guerilla army. Agu wasn’t much older than they are now, so I think what happened to him really resonated with them. Later in the movie, though, there’s a machete scene…and a stomping scene (I don’t want to go into details and spoil anything in the movie) which we had them turn their heads to not look.
So, our first “adventure” worked out well. Luke, one of my twins, has gotten very excited by this beginning. He sat with me as I did Google search after Google search, developing the next stops around the world. I asked him if he liked this project. He looked at me, wide-eyed, and just nodded his approval. Translation? He’s very excited and approves my plans. Eli, my other twin, concurs! Natural dancer that he is, I think he's excited to begin learning the dances of Africa.
Be sure to check out more of the World Culture Tour.
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