Pineapples are not the only fruit

Well Kate's telling you all about what we're actually up to at aulacode.blogspot.com, so for want of anything more interesting to tell you about, here's a quick guide to West African food.

ORANGES: Nothing like the sweet succulent things you're used to back home, these little buggers are apparently the result of cross-breeding with gravel. But as with manioc (which is poisonous raw), immense ingenuity has been brought to bear to render them edible. First you zest off all the skin with a razor blade; then you pile them up on metal candelabra things on your stall, so they look all pretty; then, when a customer buys some, you lop off the top. Customer then squeezes the contents into their mouth through the hole and drops the spent skin by the road, where they gather in the dust like bust tennis balls.
Don't try this at home with a real orange. Given that the technique can turn a stringy, dry, potatoeish orange into something to which the man from Del Monte would say yes, if you did it to the real succulent McCoy the shockwaves would probably be felt in Minsk.

PINEAPPLES: Inexplicably, if you buy a pineapple from a street stall they go to a great deal of effort to cut it into little blocks; but if you go to a vaguely upmarket restaurant they do what we do at home, ie cut it in four and slice out the succulent bit. In Francophone countries this is given the unduly flash name of "Ananas en pirogue", which means "pineapple in a canoe" and I guess sounds sort of picturesque which must be why you pay four times as much. I'm not moaning about the price, which is a pittance either way - I'm just blanching at the premium.

COFFEE: Yesterday Kate and I, in that desperate manner common among people who've spent about a month along way from home, made a list of all the foodie delights we wanted when we got home. Amongst the usual Western-style dishes, the odd one out was West African cafe au lait, from which we're in withdrawal because they only do it the good way in Francophone countries and we've been in Ghana all of, ooh, four days.
The good way involves taking a metal bowl and putting it on a plate; filling the bottom with tooth-looseningly sweet condensed milk and sprinkling said with instant Nescaf (forget "proper" coffee); and pouring hot water on to that. Really, try it. It's much nicer than an ordinary cuppa. But it has to be in a metal bowl.

STAPLES: Last night I had what had been billed to me as the worst food you can eat in Africa, and quite liked it. It's called banku, and it's basically a lump of fermented maize meal dough. You break off a bit with your right hand and dip it in sauce, and finish when you've consumed about a quarter of it because it does the sort of things to your insides that you'd expect from a wallpaper paste enema. The banku was fine, although the tilapia fish I ate it with has the most intense smell of any fish I've come across, which is still with me after washing my hands I don't know half a dozen times at least. Other than that, it's been rice and spaghetti all the way.