Monday, October 24, 2005 Today is the first day of Month 2! Wow. It's amazing to me that we've already been at post for an entire month. In honor of it, I finally finished reading Shogun (James Clavell), which was quite good. In honor of finishing reading Shogun, I read Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson)this weekend. It was very, very good. Now I'm reading Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (Tom Robbins).

WARNING!
The rest of this post has to do with food

This weekend was awesome. I made so much food it was ridiculous. No. Really. It was, and remains ridiculous. I knew on Friday night that it was time to buy meat, so I made plans to go over to Marché Depot on Saturday morning to do just that. I also knew that it was time to make some chili, so that meant beans. I arrived with minimal hassle, and a great deal on the zemidjan and quickly found what I was looking for; a dude with a knife and a dead thing on a table. I really wanted to get out of there quick (there was a meeting at the workstation with an auditor from Peace Corp's Inspector General), so I didn't even ask what the animal was. I think it was cow, but it might have been sheep too. Whatever. He pointed to two parts, the standard part and "filet". I went with filet and right there in front of me he hacked a big chunk off, weighed it and into the bag it went.

Next stop was beans. The Grand Marché unfortunately is pretty crappy in the beans department (they have only black-eyed peas, which are good... but not what I wanted), but Marché Depot rocks my socks off. They had black beans, red beans, I think I may have even seen chickpeas. (I need to confirm this so I can buy mass quantities. I am going to make falafel) The first lady I stopped to buy black beans was really suprised.

"Vous mangez ça?" (You eat that?)
"Oui... c'est pas bonne?" (Yeah, is that not good?)
"Non, non, c'est bonne! Qui vous a enseigné ça?" (No, no that's good! Who taught you?)
"Uhh... moi-même" (Uh, I taught myself)
"Ah!" (Ah! Actually there isn't really a translation for the noise she made. It's a very Beninese sort of surprise/delight squeek)

So, after that I bought a few other random veggies and back home I went.

Let me say now, beans are the best and worst thing ever. Here (and maybe at home too, I never made beans in the States) you have to glaner the beans before you can do anything. This means essentially inspecting each and every bean, in the process eliminating ones that have been eaten by bugs, rocks, dead bugs, live bugs, and pretty much anything that isn't a bean. It took FOREVER. And it's boring. I finally finished after several hours of going in and out of doing it. (I made steak and mashed potatoes for lunch, which took up quite a bit of time) and went off to the workstation. I made sure to take with me all of the ingredients necessary to make ginger beer.

Oh yes, you read correctly. Ginger Beer. Sweet, ambrosiatic ginger beer. Well, that's the idea. It takes at least 24 hours... and our yeast was dead so we reheated it and added living yeast. I'll try the fruits of our efforts today.

Everything went well, and I went back to my house to make fried rice with leftover rice and steak. It was deliciously awesome. I also put my beans in water to soak overnight. So. I have an interesting bean revelation to share with you. Turns out a kilogram of dried beans is a lot of beans. I mean, it doesn't look like a lot when you put them into soak... but when you stumble into the kitchen dreary eyed on Sunday morning and you find they have pushed the lid off the pot they were soaking in you will realize how much bean is packed into each of those unassuming packages. Holy crap there is a lot. So, I cooked them. It took a long time, and then I made Chili. I was hoping I'd use... oh, maybe half of them in the chili. I used possibly a quarter, and that resulted in more an amount of chili equal to the amount of beans in total (after the addition of meat and veggies and things). So now I have a crap load of chili and a crap load of beans.

That's okay though. Tonight we're going to make refried beans and have a reprise mexican night. It'll rock, and with ginger beer it'll be even better.

Then, last night we had a "bread date" as they shall now be called. We made an olive-rosemary loaf and a lentil soup. Both delicious.

I think it will suffice to say that with my massive bean ingestion yesterday, last night was hillarious.

Oh. I'm making chili-dogs for lunch today. Possibly with chili fries.