The food here in Accra is a strong reason to stay here longer!

I am lucky to have a cast-iron stomach (most of the time, anyway) and get to eat whatever the local dishes are where I have travelled so far. Staying here in Accra for several months now, I have delighted in getting to know the cooking, and it is wonderful.

My all-time favorite is the spicy dark sauce or paste known as shito or "black pepper sauce" (said, black peh-peh/pay-pay sauce). You can eat that on just about anything, from fried yam wedges (called koliko) to rice or noodles or chicken, anything. Everyone has their own secret recipe to make it, and some are better than others. So far as I can make out the ingredients include dried smoked fish, hot peppers, tomato, garlic... probably other stuff too.

Then there is the notorious fufu, which is often described as a "glutinous mass." It does not have much taste, or not at first. It really has about as much flavor as pasta, and you know how that can be a good thing :-) It is something that I have come to like very much, and my favorite way to eat it is with palm nut soup, bright red-orange and spicy! My friends have taught me or let's say encouraged me, to learn how to eat with my fingers, well enough now not to make a mess.

Just recently I have tried and liked a rice and beans (red cowpea) dish called watchie, and a breakfast mush called oblaio, which looks alot like hominy. I eat the watchie with black pepe sauce, fishy tomato sauce and palava. Palava is a dark green and thick sauce, I think made of some kind of leaves with so far unidentified other bits in it -- sounds soooo appetizing, doesn't it? But it is very tasty. Often the watchie with these sauces is served with a hard-boiled egg on one side, looking orange from having been rolled once in the tomato sauce.

Other soups and sauces include okro (okra) stew, groundnut (peanut) stew, and light soup (something like chicken soup). If you don't like fufu, you can have any of these with kenkey (steamed corn meal dough), banku (I think but I'm not sure, this is another kind of cornmeal or maybe corn flour dough, more of a paste consistency) or something called chi-chi (the spelling is most likely wrong here), which is made of cassava like fufu, only the cassava has been dried and made into flour. Chi-chi feels much more like bread dough than fufu does, but I like fufu better.

Only occasionally does the food defeat me. Once I bought some watchie with a tomato stew, and it was put into a plastic bag for me to take home -- but when I got home and looked at the bag, there was a fish head looking back at me from the midst of the sauce...