Phone call from Ghana

Kitchen Club was celebrating the cuisine of Ghana on Wednesday. Due to our five-day internet outage, we had been unable to do our usual flurry of Google research for recipes. I have a couple of cookbooks that proved somewhat helpful in coming up with some examples of West African cuisine, but I really lucked out when I managed to find some plantains at the large grocery store in Nelson. We'd never tried them and this was the excuse we'd been looking for. We sliced them, deep-fried them at 350 F, and then garnished them with salt and tabasco. We managed to get them golden brown, crispy on the outside and still tender on the inside. They were delicious!

But the odd thing was that the other family we do Kitchen Club with got a phone call from Ghana that morning, just before they headed up to our place. It wasn't a total out-of-the-blue coincidence (we chose Ghana in part because their gift shop sells baskets imported from that country, and the fellow who does the importing was calling about business stuff), but it was still pretty neat. "What do you eat there?" D. asked him, doing some last-minute research. "A lot of starch and a lot of fat," he replied. "There are a lot of great reasons to visit Ghana, but food isn't usually one of them" he said with a sigh.

Ah well, we enjoyed our deep-fried plantains, peanut bread and ground-nut stew. And filled the rest of the afternoon with skating. Incongruously enough.