Our good friends the Kasongo’s, and after only 4 months of helping them, we consider them to be good friends, invited us to have an “African dinner” with them on Friday. I think our invitation for them to try an American dinner of pizza <LINK> with us last time inspired them to invite us for a meal. It was our turn to try some new foods the first time!
I was mildly surprised when I arrived (before the kids since I take the train and bus from work) and they had appetizers, it seemed for me. First, I was invited to wash my hands off in a bowl of hot water. Clearly the African or Congoan equivalent of washing hands, but that uses much less water with just a bowl and no soap, passed from person to person. There were hard boiled eggs and a round puffy thing that turned out to be a beignet – basically a doughnut. Tasty and both foods I was familiar with, though the beignet had a little different texture than the ones I tried in New Orleans years before. Once my family arrived, we had dinner in their basement (the only room large enough for a large table that we call could eat at. Dinner with their 7 kids and our 4 kids makes for an adventure together! The main course was sardines with a red sauce and a kind of white corn meal porridge that was very thick and somewhat firm/spongy. This recipe for Fu Fu on the African Bites food blog seems to be what we ate. It was my first time trying sardines – a strong fishy taste that reminded me of canned tuna fish. The sardines came from a can and I”m not sure what the red sauce was. There was also a salad – essentially a coleslaw with cabbage, tomato, onion, carrots in a white, tangy/spicy dressing.
We had a great time sharing a meal together. Some of the food was a bit different – some we liked and some we didn’t like. Our kids all had differing opinons. I think they enjoyed that the corn meal mush was allowed to be eaten with their fingers- at least that’s how the teenage girls of the family ate it, so it seemed to be a traditional African way to eat. The parents used utensils, so we followed their lead.
What a fun experience to try new foods with our friends. Now, I try envisioning immigrating to Africa where many of the normal foods are different from my lifelong experience. Kind of like the corn meal and sardines, I envision that many of the flavors are different and some are ones I’d wonder why anyone in the world would choose as a favorite dish.