Bon Appetit! Local Cuisine in Cameroon.
on The Road Less Travelled (Cameroon), 25/Aug/2010 12:24, 34 days ago
Lately I have been lucky to have benefited from the generosity of my local friends who have been cooking up a storm so I can try their local dishes. On the weekend I had a dinner with my tennis friends and one of their sisters had cooked njamma njamma and beef stew with fried plantains. Njamma njamma is like sautéed spinach with tomatoes, onions and spices. Sometimes it can be quite bitter but Paul’s sister cooked it wonderfully. We had a great dinner at my place which involved a lot of jokes in Pidgin which I am slowly understanding.On Sunday another tennis friend who missed the dinner made me Ndole and rice. Ndole is more bitter than njamma njamma and has fish and beef in it. It is also made with a green spinach like vegetable. It is the south’s version of the Folere which I made in the far north.On monday I spent the evening with my new adoptive Cameroonian family. It was a great evening as I not only got to eat some great food but I also learned how to cook some. On the menu for dinner was njamma njamma and grilled fish which had a light curry spice on it. We also had foo foo corn which is like staple here. It is corn flour that has been cooked with boiling water until it forms a ball of playbough like consistency. It has a lovely tortilla chip flavour though.After eating, I was taught how to make Koki! Koki is a labour intensive dish made from crushed corn kernels. Essentially fresh corn is taken off the cob and crushed so it forms a paste of corn chowder-like consistency. Then we added salt, Maggi cubes (MSG), onions, leeks, chives, hot peppers and a green leafy vegetable like spinach. It was stirred up and palm oil was added. Then the mixture was scooped onto banana and plantain leaves and wrapped up and placed in a large pot which had water in it to steam the Koki bundles. We ran out of leaves near the end of the process and used tinfoil for some of the bundles but they have a piece of banana leaf inside for flavour.The bundles were steamed overnight and this morning I woke up to Koki for breakfast. It was quite tasty and everyone agreed that it had turned out exceptionally well.