Cooking class

It's been a long time coming, and the other day when yet another class was canceled due to no-shows I took the opportunity to be home early and learn how to cook a Senegalese dish start to finish. I'm so proud of what I learned that I want to share a little bit about it.

The dish is called "domoda," a classic Senegambian fish and rice combo with a thick tomato-y sauce and all the regular veggies, cabbage, manioc, carrots, turnips, squash, etc. the details of all the prep aren't terribly exciting. But then there came the moment that I was asked to squish the tomatoes one by one with my bare hands. How satisfying. And it got better. We started frying the fish up a little bit and suddenly it all made sense. I had never been able to figure out the tiny, slightly irregular marble-type things in the food. But here they were, fried fish eyeballs. Who knew they could balloon like that?

once we finished prep for lunch it was time to get started on dinner. In Senegalese cuisine lunch is the main meal. It requires a long time to cook and is usually quite a bit more expensive (and tasty) than dinner. For dinner, we tend to have a little bit of rice with bits of dried fish or kinds of meat 'extras', stomach, organs and the like. The dried fish, known as "ketcha" that ends up in these dishes is very inexpensive because it is actually fish that has started to spoil and then was dried and salted. I've known this for a long time and I guess I learned to live with it (and the strong taste that comes with it). Habit can change I suppose. Well for dinner I got to prepare the ketcha. I was handed a paper bag with three dried fish in it and told to pick out the bones. I started to work using my best knowledge of the anatomy of a fish and was bent intently over my task when I realized that in the effort to pick out the tiny bones I had completely ignored the fact that I was actually digging right into maggots. I was more than a little shocked, but I couldn't drop the fish and make a scene... it is, after all, the same dish we eat almost every day. So I leaned casually over to my sister and asked her about it. She told me I was doing just fine... when we washed the fish later all the maggots would come off.

Bon appetit!