Food likes and dislikes

Hello. Welcome to the podcast and today I will talk about foods that I ate in Benin. Everyone has foods that they like and those that they dislike, so today I will use many different ways to express your preferences. I have chosen 5 different foods for today. Those 5 foods are pounded yam, red palm oil, soy, cow skin, and rice and beans. Before I start I want to say that in general the food in Benin was delicious. It was rare that I ate something that I didn’t like, and I never refused a dish because I didn’t like it.

Let’s get started with a dish that everyone in Benin likes, pounded yam, or as I called it in village, agu. I usually ate pounded yam with peanut sauce but sometimes we would mix the peanut sauce with egusi sauce. I don’t know the name for egusi in English but I found it on the internet recently and it comes from a gourd. I did not know that it came from a gourd before coming back to the United States so that was a big surprise. But my favorite way to eat pounded yam is with peanut sauce and egusi sauce mixed. I usually would eat pounded yam with fish because I usually chose fish before chicken or another kind of a meat.

Next is red palm oil. This is an oil which is a liquid fat, or in french l’huile. It comes from the palm tree and is very red in color. This oil was used to make many sauces and I didn’t mind the taste. That means that the taste was not bad, however I didn’t like how I felt after eating red palm oil. When I finished my meal I always wanted to burp. A burp is when air comes out of your mouth and it makes a sound. I will burp for you. Burp. Red palm oil made me burp and it gave me a stomach ache. If I played soccer or football on the same day that I ate red palm oil,oof it was painful to run, so for this reason I dislike red palm oil. I didn’t like how I felt after eating it.

The next food is the one I disliked the most. Cow is the animal that gives us milk and the skin is the part of the animal that isn’t meat and is on the outside of the body. I didn’t like cow skin, first off, because of the smell. It smelled like bad animal. Second, the texture was slimy. A texture is the way the food feels in your mouth. Pounded yam has a wonderful texture like bread. Some foods have a hard texture, but cow skin tasted slimy to me. Okra or gumbo is slimy when you put it in water and the cow skin -it was disgusting. The taste was not good and the texture was slimy. Fortunately I didn’t have to eat much cow skin.

One of my best surprises in Benin was soy. Soy comes from a soy bean and it is pounded into a brick, or as one of my village friends said, brick of fifteen. Brique de quinze. Because it used to cost 15 franc for a square, a brick. Now it costs 25 franc. I really enjoyed eating soy, even though Beninese people were surprised that I liked it. I think that it is associated with poor people in Benin, but in the United sStates it is seen as a healthy food and people think of it as a food for richer people. The reason why it was a surprise is because I cannot eat soy from America. I sometimes vomit or I get a stomachache or indigestion when I my stomach cannot digest the soy. So I was so happy to be able to eat soy in Benin.

Ok this is the last food that I want to talk about and this was my favorite. That food is atasi, washe, wake, rice and beans. When I was in the United States very often I had rice and beans, but the special thing about Beninese rice and beans is the sauce that the people put on it. The sauce is delicious and I must say I preferred atasi or the rice and beans of the south. I really like to eat it with a good piece of fried cheese, what I called in village amo or wagashi in the south. I also would order atasi or rice and beans with an egg, a hard boiled egg. This is a food that I cooked very often for myself. Whenever I went to a restaurant, I would order rice and beans.

Overall living in Benin was very easy and I think a big part of that was commonality of rice and beans.