Malian Restaurant

Today, I got a Facebook friend request from the representative of the most prestigious agricultural school in Mali. He was in charge of Canada World Youth while we were there, and I'm hoping his friending me coincides with his having received my mail. He was the guy I sent my photos to, so he could send them on to Karadie.

I was wondering the other day if it would be possible to open a restaurant based on Malian cuisine. Probably not the stuff straight from the villages, but you know how there's Chinese restaurants which are Chinese-themed but tailored to North American taste? I've even eaten at an Ethiopian restaurant. So let's see what we've got here.

It wouldn't be Malian cuisine without toh. It's probably the most Malian food out there. A lot of the Malians in our group struggled with the village food, because even though they were Malian, they were still upper-middle class, and there is a difference between the food in the villages and the food in the cities. But they all loved the toh, whereas the Canadians struggled with it. Even people native to Bamako, where they don't serve it for some reason (every other major city in Mali serves it, so I don't know why Bamako is the exception) were eager for the chance to eat toh.

So, question is, how do we tailor it to appeal to North Americans? It's a pastry that you rip chunks off of and dunk in sauce. The sauces available were a kind of green sauce, which was made from the leaves of local trees, there was a gumbo sauce which was made from a wild plant in the area. I remember when we were ripping out the plants to make the field, we were specifically instructed not to weed out the gumbo plants. Then there was a red sauce. I don't know what the red sauce was, but it was what you hoped to get if you were eating toh.

Anyway, the concept of a pastry and sauce isn't really unappealing. The red sauce was mild and kind of spicy. The green sauce... is hard to explain, but it didn't taste like something you should be eating. The gumbo sauce was like mucus, but it was still better than the green sauce.

You could also mix the toh with milk and sugar to make a porridge. That was pretty good. They had a couple more traditional porridges made from corn and millet. Millet doesn't usually fly so well over here, but they might like the corn porridge.

They'd naturally serve rice. Yo, Wikipedia says there is no rice in Mali. HOW IGNORANT! Anyway, yeah, rice. When we were in Canada, we served chicken on rice, with peanut sauce as the representative Malian food. They mainly used the chickens for eggs, but we could still serve it, with the option of goat or beef.

There was quite a bit of fish, depending on region. Remember, I spoke on the fishing-people who were sometimes referred to with the derogative term "Bozo". We ate quite a bit of fish in Bamako, too.

The best meal I ever had in Mali was chicken, that came with these huge, round things of bread that had the consistency of pizza dough. It was served with an onion sauce and the bread was fresh. I put the chicken on the bread, and the onion sauce on the chicken. It was near the end, and I was trying to look toward Canadian food as an incentive to want to go home. I remember thinking that this experience ruined my fantasy, because it was better than I could imagine anything being in Canada. We ate this in the village, too, not the city.

They served something that sounded like Kon-kon, which was basically a salad, but it didn't use lettuce, and instead used a lot of hard vegetables like cucumber, tomato, and onion. You could stick quite a bit of other good stuff, like hard-boiled eggs in there, too.

They had something called "Malian steak" which was steak served ultra-thin, and covered in spices. They had shish-kabobs sometimes, but they'd only put meat on the sticks. You could eat it with vegetables, but they'd be on the side.

There was something else, which was a type of sauce that went on those big balls of pizza dough bread. Kind of a meaty sauce. I had mine with goat head, but I don't think most North Americans would find that palatable. Apparently, it's not necessary, too. More of a delicacy. Anyway, this stuff was good.

There'd be beans, too, naturally. And French fries. If served together, they'd be mixed up. If you had mayonnaise, you'd mix that in, too. Not the classiest meal, but it tasted REALLY GOOD. Sometimes the fries were these sweet potato fries, too, which were even better.

And they had these diced potatoes or sweet potatoes, that would be served with a kind of sweet tomato sauce.

Depending on the season, they'd roast corn or peanuts to eat casually outside of meals. Those were both very nice. Apparently, mangos are huge in Mali, but only during hot season, so we were never exposed to them.

As far as drinks go, the Malians loved their tea, but it was more of a social occasion type deal. We had some kind of fruit drink during Canadian phase as the representative juice of Mali, but we never drank it again. In Mali, we had something that tasted sort of like grape juice. Thing is, it was served hot, like the tea. I was not in love with the warm grape juice. You could get it cold in Sirakorola, since a few of the shops had refrigerators there.

You might be able to make some kind of menu with the material I've listed here.

Random photos today. I figured out how to put more than five photos in an update, but I'm not going to. I'll stretch it out more this way, just so that I have more material to blog about.



The children here are trying to play chess by imitating what they saw the Canadians doing. They'd sit there, glaring at the pieces. Then one kid would put a piece from his side somewhere completely random on the board. Then the other kid would scream in mock rage. It was pretty funny.



This is a construct built to provide shade. The word for it in Bambara is... is the N-word. When they'd be giving me Bambara lessons, they'd get to that one, and I'd be hesitant to say it. When I did, they'd be all "That's good, Ali! Ali speaks such good Bambara!" They must have thought I was worried about my accent or something. On the theme of words that sound the same but have different meanings, the word for "shut up" is "boner". Pretty funny.



This is a barn. Not much to say here.



This is the only evidence that I ever had cornrows. A girl in the other group tried to take a picture of me, but I guess she didn't understand my camera, because it's not on there.

I'm pretty sure this is a girl's hairdo. All the women had cornrows, and all the men were bald. When the girl offered to tress my hair, I asked her if it was a girl's haircut, and she said no, it was for boys too, so I went along with it. Afterward, all the villagers, men and women alike complimented my hair, so whatever.

I didn't realize that I wasn't supposed to wash my hair when it was like that, so in three days, my hair was back to normal.

It's true that all the village women had cornrows, but if they were going anywhere even remotely formal, like the weekly market or a village meeting, then they'd wear a wig. All the Malian women had short hair, and in every photo you see of a long-haired Malian, it's a wig.



This is a well. They invited me to fetch water a few times. It's basically what you probably imagine. You throw a bucket attached to a rope down there, and then you pull it up when it's full of water.