Salone Food (1)

Food is a pretty important thing. Kate likes to joke that me and Krystle start thinking about our next meal just an hour or so after we finish the last one. The truth is it’s probably even sooner! I’d like to say it’s because we have to plan so much here, with having no fridge etc, and it is partly that, but also that we just like to eat! In fact, given what I eat it is a miracle that I’ve lost so much weight since getting here! I blame the heat and the dancing!!!

Salone’s most popular food is plassas, which consists of rice (what else?!) and then a sauce made with either cassava leaf, potato leaf or krin krin, lots of pepper and magi and some meat and/or fish. And of course palm oil (quite a lot of it, eh Mario?). I’m a big plassas fan and I often eat this at breakfast time from the cookry shop. Another cookry favourite is groundnut soup (which is a stew made with groundnuts (peanuts) and meat and pepper and eaten with rice.

There’s also plenty of street food in Salone that you can buy for a few block (quick conversion: 1 block = 100 leones. 6000 leones = £1). Salted plaintain chips in plastic bags are an essential when you travel up country. ‘Ice’ is some kind of frozen yoghurt type thing that you eat out of a plastic bag (a slightly less sophisticated version of yoghurt in tubes!), which we always get on the way to the beach. Bread with sweet milk, which is bread that is spread with sweetened condensed milk (real comfort food). Roast meat, usually goat meat that is fried with onions and pepper and wrapped in newspaper to take home. There are an assortment of biscuits, beniseed cakes and banana breads or fried doughnut type things that people carry round ready to sell. You can buy green bananas everywhere and orinch (oranges) that have been peeled, that you bite the top off and suck the juice from (it’s a method I have almost mastered!).

Finally, but one of my favourites, there is fry fry. We have a fry fry lady who comes to our office every lunchtime. She sells fried chicken and fish, fried plantains, binch (beans cooked with onion and pepper and oil), boiled cassava roots and fish balls. My regular lunch is fried plantain with binch and if I’m lucky, hot bread from the bakery across the street. Yum yum!

Sierra Leone is not exactly renowned for it’s cuisine, in fact a friend of mine (who will not be named here… answers on a postcard!) once commented whilst eating my (English) cooking that “this is alright really, or maybe I’ll just eat anything in Sierra Leone!” However, I’m a big fan of Salone food. In fact, it struck me whilst writing this that there is a whole host of other food that I haven’t yet mentioned, not to mention the drinks, so I’m going to call this post Salone Food (1) because I’ve got 8 months left on my placement and lots of eating still to do!