The Stomach: Window to the Soul?

What better place to start, than by commenting on food, drink, and all manner of innocuous ingestions! Indeed, my stay here began with good old-fashioned tap water, and has been peppered with interesting tidbits ever since... On my first morning here, I padded down the hall to the kitchen, where my roommate was brewing coffee, and asked how he felt about Dakar tap water. It took very little convincing -an anecdote about his American wife, Carmen, who was quickly weaned onto the tap, and perhaps a waft or two of coffee- for me to reconcile myself to this new source of hydration. Only tap water delivers!

Strangely, it seems that my fellow toubaabs (or foreigners) believe that tap water delivers more than just a coffee buzz. They say it delivers a fabulous rumble in the lower tummy. I say they have but to observe any food preparation to see that the restaurant food they eat also contains tap water; that is, realistically they cannot avoid it. Moutarou, my roommate, attributes this water anxiety to "la peur de l'Afrique." This of course, refers to an ensemble of symptoms, that climb on board your imagination when you disembark on African territory...

Then again, now that his wife is sick in a New York hospital, my roommate has resorted to the marabout's recommendations for her well-being. The recipe is as follows: buy 9 kilos of raw meat; mix it with onions and beans; entrust a third of this mixture to a blind person, another third to a leper, and the remainder to a person with a physical handicap. As Moutarou ventures out to identify a leper colony, I think I will cozy up on the couch and continue to sip at my tap water coffee. Perhaps the recipe will be of more interest to you? The main ingredient is a pepper called "le poivre de Sélim." Ground with coffee beans and ginger, it makes for an aromatic and spicy cup of coffee, best served hot!

Café Touba (Sénégal)
INGREDIENTS : (4 personnes)
PREPARATION :

- 60 gr.de café moulu- 5 dl d'eau- 10 poivre de Sélim concassé finement- 1/2 cuil. à café de gingembre concassé- 1/2 cuil. à café de coriandre concassé- 80 gr. de sucre

- Préparez un mélange avec le café et les épices.
- Faire cuire l'eau.
- Préparez un filtre à café sur une cafetière.
- Déposez le café dans le filtre et versez l'eau dessus.
- Sucrez et servir très chaud.

Ba beneen, InShaaAllah! C'est à dire, si Dieu le veut, à très bientôt!