Cooking In Mali (by Amanda)

Living overseas presents its own sets of challenges: you’ve heard about our grocery shopping, house hunting, driving and all kinds of unique experiences we have shared. Sometimes things as normal as cooking become an adventure. Like the other day I was opening tomato paste when the contents exploded over me and the wall I thought “Wow! Did it have range!” The fun part is all the new things we get to try. Some things stay the same; other things are totally different. When we went to church a couple weeks ago I even got to stir the food. I stood over this big pot with a huge metal spoon and stirred what seemed like ten pounds of food. It was a photo moment. After church we then got to eat the meal that was prepared in the big pot and it was delicious! Even the name sounds good: “nsaame” (pronounced “en-SAHM-ay”).
At home we eat a lot of what is familiar: steak, potatoes, spaghetti, even tacos. The big difference always is in how it’s prepared. For tacos we have our house help make the tortilla chips (she does a better job than I do). For spaghetti there is no store bought sauce for us; so it’s just a little different every time. It depends on whether I have tomato paste or tomato sauce at home for making it.
Often I am looking for new recipes on line which can get a bit tricky because there they tend to have prepackaged food in each recipe. For example, the other day I made a breakfast casserole and it had as one of the ingredients “frozen hash browns” so I made my own hash browns for the casserole. If I cannot find a certain ingredient I often try to substitute something else or I may just move on but it is always fun to look. I know this may seem normal to a lot of you, but I never liked cooking at lot in the US, so this is all new to me. Here is the recipe for nsaame. It was given to me in Bambara so this is my translation:

• The list of things you need are: oil, tomatoes, onions, meat, carrots, potatoes, cabbage, pepper, tomato paste, garlic, najini (boulin cubes), salt, water and rice.
• Put oil in a pan and brown the meat (usually they use some sort of beef). Add some water, tomato paste, and boulin and bring to a boil and let it simmer. Cut up the onion in rings, cut up tomato, carrots, potato, and cabbage (not too small). Add garlic pepper and salt as you want. Bring to a boil and then let it simmer for a couple of hours.
• Make rice and place the sauce on top.
• As you can see in the picture, hard boiled eggs also make a good topping.
  

Sorry that this is missing details (like how much of each thing), but that is how they give recipes here. They basically tell you at the end to cook it until it is ready and they never tell you a teaspoon of this or a cup of that you just have to give it your best estimate.
If anyone out there tries this, please let me know how it turned out and what you think. We love eating African cuisine, and enjoy sharing it.