Cooking Lessons

*I'm starting this post with a warning - especially to my vegetarian friends - as I am now living a lot further away from the supermarket, and I am really getting back in touch with where food comes from - so if you are squeamish at all you might want to skip the first pic in this one.

Marcus had been asking Mariam and Bintou to teach him how to cook the traditional Malian peanut sauce - tiga dege na - since he arrived at Syama about two years ago. He's also a huge fan of saga saga, which is a green sauce made from a locally grown plant (as it turns out, the leaves from the top of the sweet potato). So we arranged to go into Fourou on our RDO and do a spot of cooking!

My first piece of advice from Dr Loes was, 'Never arrive at an African household without taking a gift of food' - so with that in mind, we arranged for a goat to be delivered, so that we could do a re-run of Wade's spit roast performance to accompany our sauces.


Yes - it really is a carcass I'm carrying

We had an eventful mission getting ourselves into town, collecting the 1/4 tonne, hand-fashioned spit-roaster was the first effort, and required five men to lift it into the ute (one woman to photograph proceedings) - and once we arrived, a quick visit to the drillers' house for a repair job!


Yes - it's really, really heavy

Thankfully there were plenty of other jobs to be done, and Guirou proved to be a very capable, though initially reluctant - Malian men don't cook you see - assistant for Mariam, while Bintou pounded some garlic for my marinade.


Preliminaries

Once the ingredients were ready it was time to start the lessons proper, so the ladies invited myself and Marcus into the kitchen to get started.


My favourite room

I documented the whole process and enjoyed the aromas with each new step - meanwhile, the men were busy doing what men do best at these functions ...


... supervising the spit!

Making saga saga is a two pot, several step operation, and also pretty entertaining to watch, as bits and pieces are continually added or removed along the way.


Saga saga - stage I

Mariam says it's her favourite sauce to prepare and she even gets a little meditative during the process.


Fanning the coals

Outside Eliza was preparing the pot for the rice. And because there was so much happening, we attracted a bit of a crowd ...


Kev and friends

... some of us more than others, and Kev was cleary two-babou of choice that day. I was still busy in the kitchen with the ladies (and Marcus) as we got to the okra stage with the saga saga.


Saga saga - stage II

And our fans were becoming a little more interested and hungry too!


Local children

Marcus was in raptures about the peanut sauce and is looking forward to trying it out on his family back in the UK this Christmas.


Checking the peanut sauce

And then Mariam showed me how to clean and sort the rice ... quite a skill I must say.


Cleaning the rice

Because local rice is hand threshed and pounded in Mali, what you get is a mixture of cracked and whole grains, which will cook unevenly if you put them in the same pot and ruin your dish. So the rice is sifted prior to use, the long and short grains separated, and any small stones or twigs which might find their way in are removed too. The sauces we were preparing are best eaten with the long-grained rice. There is another traditional rice dish made with the short grains that is just superb - Mariam and Bintou had prepared it for me before when I spent another lazy RDO in the yard in Fourou.

(Kev was pretty impressed with Mariam's style with the wicker sifter, and has decided that perhaps we should send the ladies out to do a bit of stream sediment sampling - they'd be naturals at panning for gold!)


Levieil

Dao's son, Levieil was keenly interested in my reaction to the final product, and just as I expected, everything was delicious!


The washing up

I think Mariam was pretty pleased with her professorial efforts, and Marcus had a very hard time deciding whether Bintou's tiga dege na or Mariam's saga saga was more enjoyable, so he went back for a second, and then a third taste - they were both so excellent he's definitely going to be cooking again at home.


Well done - sensai and student

Meanwhile chef Simmo's supervision of the spit delivered A1 results on the marinated roast goat front - he celebrated with a quick spin around the block on Salikou's ...


Mali Davison* - magic!

*Thanks to Catherine C for introducing us to that delightful term.

This one's for you Kate ...

Katie Fraser - just for you, all the way from France ...


Pims!

*A quick aside, in an unbelievable stroke of good luck, I discovered that you can buy Pims - in orange and framboise - at the Total service station in Bobo-Diaolasso on the Bobo-Ouagadougou road in Burkina Faso. What I also discovered is, that Pims are absolutely no good in any way warmed up!

Last French post ... for now!

I know, I know, I know - you are all dying with envy, so I'm not going to bore you with shots of devine countryside and fairybook châteaux - I'm saving the slideshow for a visit home - but I think I do need to share a few shots from our wine lovers' tour.


Les raisins pinot noir

Sally and I set out for the Bourgogne region south of Dijon on recommendations from various sources (including Richard in Mali, and Magali in Monpellier) and we were absolutely delighted to hit the slopes and get stuck into the great pinot noirs of France - hard to resist!


Sunset over the vines

The route des grands crus de Bourgogne winds through some of the most charming little villages in northern France and there are so many caves and so much to look at it is hard to decide where to stop.

Thank goodness we had Magali's top spot Domaine Lejeune in the village of Pommard as number one on the hit list. This family run business uses a mixture of traditional methods with some modern science to produce absolutely devine wines - but more importantly, the grand patriarch of the family began a tradition of sharing the knowledge through entertaining informal discussions and has passed on his knowledge over the years at the university - a true raconteur!


Resting on lies

So we did the tour twice - premièrement en français then, afterwards in English.


Domaine Lejeune picnic wine

We learnt all about how burgundy wines are classified, how well they age, who's who in the biz and best of all ...


Ooooo, I love a complex wine

... how good they taste! We'd met up with Paul in Dijon (and Barb is still crying because her beer loving bro' got to join us instead of her good self) ... and dragged him along for the ride.


The 1978 vintage

Unfortunately we weren't allowed to try the €300-a-bottle vintage - but we were allowed to look.

And no wine tour is complete without a picnic spot and picnic fixings, and by this stage Sally and I became dab hands at finding the markets, and ordering the finest fromages, pâtés de campagne, legumes, pains, boutouns de chèvre, pistaches - all the good things!


Faire des courses

So from la Bourgogne we headed west to the Loire Valley and sampled a whole new range of wines (and castles - sorry, saving those shots!) and vistas.


Wish it was our voiture

How can you complain if you're ambling through the vignobles in vintage green sports car on a sunny autumn afternoon?


Although the Megane was fine for us

Luckily we were pretty content in our highly electronic hire car, when the 'intuitive technology' didn't get the better of us. From Tours it was back to Paris via some wonderful towns, including Chartres where we stopped and filled up on medieval cathedrals and chili-flavoured chocolate - and also the unwonderful town of Palaiseau, just south of Orly, where we passed a very traumatising 45-minutes going around in circles and thinking we might get stuck there forever (it's that logical French sign-posting that I blame - sheesh!)

After a crazy trip back in to Paris from the périphérique and battling peak hour on the metro to find our hotel, we eventually managed to catch up with Annette to reminisce about the old times in Antony's class at the Alliance Français de Melbourne and that promise we made to meet up again in Paris!


Antony's girls!