Banku!

Ok, so maybe I am not Ghanaian, but I’m starting to learn the tricks to cooking Ghanaian food.   Wondering what I eat here in Ghana?  In the mornings I usually have some bread.  If it is the weekend I get to have an omelet, which is by far one of my favorite parts of the week.  For lunch we usually have rice with ground peppers.  For dinner we usually have fufu (cassava boiled and then pounded into a sticky raw dough like consistency), banku (cassava dough and maize mixed with water and boiled until it again makes a sticky raw dough like consistency), or akple (maize and water boiled until it becomes thick).  Each of those is usually served with some kind of stew.  My favorite is groundnut stew, but you don’t get that often because groundnuts can be expensive.  Most of the time the stew is made of either okra and greens or okra and garden egg (like egg plant) and has peppers, onion, garlic, dried fish and sometimes tomatoes.  Last night I helped make the banku.  It is not as easy as it looks!  Cooking with the kids was really fun and reminded me how much I miss cooking at home.  Before I left life had gotten to be very busy and I found that I didn’t cook much from scratch, now living here reminds me that cooking from scratch makes the food taste so much better, is relaxing, and is a way of showing love to your family.   To cook Banku you have to start with cassava dough, add in some maize add water until it is thin like crepe batter then boil it stirring continuously until it get thick and forms a ball.  Your banku then becomes your utensil.  You pinch off a bit of it and scoop up your food with it.  Delicious!