Friday Fryday

At the end of each week, all the Peace Corps Volunteers who happen to be in Kankan have taken to getting together to cook dinner. Friday Fry-Day, as it is known both here and in Senegal, has definitely become a thing. The dinners started out relatively modestly, onion rings and cucumber salad and banana bread, but over the weeks we've gotten more ambitious. Egg rolls with sweet-and-sour sauce.  Chocolate-glazed donuts. Herb-roasted chicken with sweet potato fries and gravy. Pizza with fresh cheese and mushrooms and caramelized onions.  Southern fried chicken and Key lime pie. Soft pretzels. Cinnamon rolls. Apple cake. All delicious. All from scratch, or at least with minimal help from spices brought in from Conakry or America.

Last week Sarah J. spearheaded the effort to make samosas, served with a mint-laced cucumber-yogurt salad and a curried lentil dish that I can’t remember how to pronounce, much less spell. I baked apple cake and cinnamon rolls with cream cheese-style topping – the beauty of Double Dessert is that everyone gets to take leftovers home for breakfast. It’s a great bonding activity, a nice morale booster, and given our kitchen, it’s just plain impressive how well things turn out, most of the time, anyway.

Indian-Italian Potluck Night

The knives we have tend to be either maddeningly dull or jaggedly sharp, we only have one baking pan, we have several enormous pots, two tiny little pots, a selection of frying pans with wonky handles, and I've never seen a measuring spoon, but we estimate pretty well. The oven here is a step up from Senegal – the door stays closed by itself and the whole front isn't held together by baling wire, duct tape, and pure hope – but it doesn't heat evenly (not that you can really set it to a specific temperature) and you can’t use both of the functional burners while baking or the whole thing goes out with a loud and disconcerting WHOOMP. Most of the time there’s running water (for the time being, anyway) and the house recently acquired a mini-fridge that works when the power’s on, which is generally every other evening or so.

The most recent menu included fried cheese wedges with marinara sauce, cucumber salad, and pirogues with sautéed onions, followed by coffee cake crumble and sweet soft pretzels with creamy whipped cinnamon topping, and it was all delicious.