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[Nigeria]Nigerian glossary

2007-03-30

Learning to cook Nigerian food

Filed under: VSO — kevin @ 14:09

The other night Suleiman came round to show me how to cook tuwon shinkafa. This is a popular staple food in northern Nigeria, one of the many different types of starchy blob. Shinkafa is the Hausa word for rice and tuwo is the generic term for starchy blobs.

It’s always eaten with some kind of soup (i.e. stew), in this case we made a sort of egusi soup, with ground pumpkin seeds. I’d been to the market and bought shinkafan tuwo (tuwo rice) and all the other ingredients the day before.

Here’s Suleiman cooking the soup and the finished product:
Suleiman standying by a cooker, stirring the contents of a large frying pan. Two plates each with two balls of tuwo and two bowls of red stew.

It came out well, although the rice could have probably done with a little more cooking to form into balls properly. I don’t often buy meat or fish, as I can’t rely on my fridge to keep food for very long, so the egusi soup had tinned tuna in instead.

The next day I realised Suleiman had probably added too much chili, I suffered from a distint burning sensation (as Marebec would put it).

Weekend in Minna

Filed under: travel,VSO — kevin @ 13:58

I got a text from Aine last week with details of what to do on arrival in Minna. I texted back and asked if she’d meant to send it to someone else. It seems that she had asked me at the St Patrick’s celebrations the week before if I wanted to come through and I’d said yes, maybe too many Guinnesses had been consumed.

After the usual bouncy and dusty trip from Kaduna I arrived and met Aine, Thessa, Jenny and Pete at Mr Biggs for breakfast. Then we headed out to Gurara Falls to cool down in the waterfall. Julia was a bit delayed coming across from Jos, so met us at the falls.

Five people sitting on a flimsy wooden bench in front of the main fall Jenny and a few small Nigeria boys paddling in a shallow pool surrounded by rocks.  Tress in the background.

We had a lovely time, although the rocks and sand were a bit too hot to spend any time lingering at the side of the water. As there hasn’t been any rain for quite a while now there wasn’t much water, so you couldn’t really swim but it was marvellous just floating and cooling off.

After a while a group of small boys appeared (they always do) and alternated between doing their own thing and watching us. Doing their own thing seemed to mostly be paddling and catching very small fish. The watching was especially intense when we were leaving and the girls were getting changed, there’s no link between staring and rudeness in Nigerian culture.
A group of small Nigerian boys sitting on rocks by the side of the river

In the evening we had a few beers and some suya at the barracks, about the only place in Minna to get alcohol. The heat was terrible, even after the sun had gone down.

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