Milk Tasting 101

Despite being fairly lactose-intolerant, I happen have opinions about the different kinds of powdered milks that are available, both here and in America. As a camper and then counselor at Camp Unalayee, a fantastic backpacking summer camp in Northern California, I developed an appreciation for Milkman low-fat powdered milk, with its bright orange box, hermetically sealed pouches, and "a kiss of cream!" Compared with the generic non-fat sacks of milk powder, which had a dull flavor, looked grayish, and always left behind gummy little clumps of residue, Milkman was a delicious, smooth, slightly rich-tasting treat. I experimented with powdered soymilk, which was fine but somewhat unimpressive, and eventually went back to Milkman and started carrying little packets of LactAid tablets around with me to mitigate the rather unbecoming symptoms of my digestive tract's inability to process lactose.

When I first arrived in Senegal I avoided milk products altogether, figuring that my poor stomach had enough to contend with already. Eventually, though, I started mixing a little bit of powdered milk into my morning oatmeal and making NesCafé-au-lait-en-poudre. When I started buying more milk Wouri, one of the local boutique owners, gave me a crash course in the merits and characteristics of different brands of milk powder. According to him, Halib, which is made in Senegal, is the best because it's pure whole milk, just dried and powdered. The other brands, VitaLait and Bonilait, are actually made by taking powdered non-fat milk and adding in vegetable fats to "refatten" it, giving it the richness and texture that people here prefer. Pretty much all the people I talked to in my village preferred Halib, but also liked VitaLait quite a bit. 

There are a few other brands but Halib and VitaLait are by far the most widely available and most popular. I wondered if other PCVs had a similar interest in powdered milks. They didn't, but they agreed to participate in a blind taste test of three kinds of powdered milk anyway, and the results were somewhat surprising. 

Of all the milks, VitaLait (Jar B) was the clear loser. It was described as "watery", "bland rice water", and "sour." It didn't mix in as smoothly as the other brands and left little globs of milk powder on the sides of the jar. Personally, I don't mind VitaLait, but I think it tastes a little plastic-y, and has a slight chemical aftertaste, but that could be partly because I don't like the idea of it being stripped of its milk fat and then artificially" re-fatted." It reminds me of how nice chocolate is made with whole cacao nuts, with the cocoa butter left in, and cheap, waxy chocolate is made by extracting the rich  cocoa butter for use in other products and then adding in cheaper, worse-tasting oils and waxes as fat-based fillers. 

Halib (Jar A), the brand that left in the milk fat instead of replacing it with vegetable fat, had mixed reviews. Some tasters really didn't like it, describing it as "dry", "enh", "fruity rotten" and "slightly fecal-tasting." However, it turned out that some of these people didn't drink cow milk in America, which might have created a bias. We realized that people who did drink cow milk back in America seemed to tend to prefer Halib, saying that it tasted "more milky", "grassy in a nice way", and "no poop taste." I think Halib is good, and agree that it has a grassy, bovine taste and I'd prefer Trader Joe's Unsweetened Organic Soy Milk, but it's not bad for the time being. 

Finally, to me Bonilait tasted exactly like non-dairy creamer. It was the whitest, finest, most opaque of all the milk powders, and it didn't taste bad. It just tasted like plain Coffeemate. The people who didn't drink cow milk before Peace Corps really preferred it, saying it tasted "good", "like Momma's teat", and "good." The people who didn't like it described it as "malt-starch-sugar", "meh", and "no."

Everyone agreed that powdered milk was not their preferred dairy or dairy-ish drink, and also that room temperature milk, powdered or otherwise, isn't very appealing. Also, all of the powders tasted pretty good if you mix them with instant coffee and sugar and leave them in the freezer for awhile.

(Many thanks to Chrissie, New Frank, Janet, Flatrick Bair, and Katie O. for making this post possible.)

Hut Sweet Hut

Buckets are such a big part of my life here. I've really come to appreciate a good, sturdy bucket, especially one with a nice lid. Here's my bath bucket (with fancy sieve/soap caddy), my food storage bucket, and my gaz tank. 

My nice burner broke the other day and this little one (the only kind available in village) that doesn't have the nice pot-guard that my other had. I use my gaz to heat up water for coffee and instant oatmeal most mornings, and during cold season I'll heat up a little pot of water to add to my bathing bucket to take the edge off the chill of cold water. Some volunteers just leave their bucket out in the sun all afternoon, but because of the shady mango tree (which is great and I love) next to my hut I've had very limited success with that during the cold season. Right now it's quite hot, and I'll just leave my water buckets (which are exactly the same as my food storage and dish storage buckets) in the coolest corner of my hut and hope they don't get too warm.

This is my wooden table. It pretty much looks like this on any given morning, with my silver water filter, various mugs and water bottles, sunblock and toothpaste, and random this and that. It's a really nice table, I like it a lot. The metal water filter is nice, too, it keeps water much cooler than the dark plastic filters that some of the volunteers have.

The table has handy shelf for stacking all sorts of things, and there's a bamboo (or whatever it is, everyone in village calls it bamboo) rod for hanging clothes to dry or keeping stuff away from the rats and bugs on the ground level.

I store clothes and things in my trunks, and then I store important things in my little suitcase because it zips up, which keeps dust and critters out. The oatmeal cans also help with the bug situation, it's easy to sweep under the trunks when they're propped up, and that keeps ants from building trails along the fine cracks in the cement, and keeps the spider population in check, too.

Peanut Butter

People in my region eat a lot of peanut sauce (my family has some sort of peanut sauce with rice for lunch every day) and that means that people make a lot of peanut butter (called tiga diga) which is a key ingredient. To make peanut butter they dry, shell, and roast the peanuts over the fire, and then pound and roll them into a paste. 

My family has a grinder (it looks like something you'd use to make sausage) but it's been broken for awhile now. 

The days of grinding peanuts into butter

Since the grinder's out of commission they take the roasted peanuts, pound them with a pestle in a big wooden mortar, and then they get glass bottle and a very flat rock or a thin slab of smooth tile and roll the pounded nuts into a very smooth butter. 

Mariama Gaulo making tiga diga

It's good, if you like unsweetened, unsalted peanut butter, which I do. My family only uses peanut butter to make sauce, and so when they found out that I like to put it on bread for breakfast (which is fantastic with bananas when I can find them) they balked a little. I figure they feel about my peanut butter sandwiches the same way that I feel about their straight-up mayonnaise sandwiches -- bismillah, to each their own, but I will stick with what I've got, thanks. 

Les Dakarois

After the  Health/EE Summit my friend Leah and I went up to Dakar and had a wonderful time visiting Rachel & Emily at their completely lovely home, which, coming from village, pretty much seemed like Hearst Castle to us.

(Rachel is going to make the best baby blankets.)

I took some photos out the window of our sept-place (the hearse-looking station wagons that have seven seats) to capture the stunning scenic beauty of the Dakar freeways. 

It was mostly partly finished houses and rubble piles and the occasional baobab, but also a surprising number of these bizarre billboards encouraging everyone to "Be clever like Leuk!" and get bank loans to buy Christmas/a fridge. Leuk is apparently the father of a family of rabbits with human bodies? 

Food Dreams

Honestly, I'm really lucky in the food department. My host family cooks really well, and they give me fresh mangoes in during mango season, roasted corn now that the harvest is coming in, and lately they've been adding beans to the leaf sauce we have for dinner. When I come in to town I can pick up oatmeal, raisins, and  snacks, and buy refrigerated yogurt and juice, and in the market there are bananas and cabbages and things like that. I also spend my fair share of time waxing nostalgic about things that are unavailable here, things like these:

1. Breakfast. Specifically whole wheat toast. And juice. And fruit. I'd say coffee but thanks to my American family I get to have Peet's coffee pretty regularly. 

Popsicles. Cold things in general, but really popsicles. 

Sprinkles. I love sprinkles, particularly rainbow sprinkles. So much that I'm willing to count them as a "food" that I miss. 

Cookie bowls. I've never actually had one but I bet it would be good with something frozen and rainbow sprinkles. (But no almond flavoring. I do not miss that. Ever.)

Vegetables. Ohhhhh vegetables. Peanut sauce is great but I wish it came with fresh vegetables.

Ramadan Food

I know that "Ramadan food" might sound like an oxymoron, but there is a lot of eating involved in celebrating Ramadan. First, there are a lot of people who aren't supposed to fast during the day, such as children, the sick, the elderly, women who are pregnant, breastfeeding, or menstruating, non-Muslims, people who are traveling long distances or doing serious manual labor, and so on.

People, like my host family, who observe Ramadan will get up before dawn to have breakfast, and then fast until seven in the evening, when they'll break the fast by eating dates and having tea and snacks while they prepare dinner. During the day they're supposed to be doing a total fast, meaning that they'll give up not just eating and drinking, but looking at, thinking about, and doing and saying sinful things. As my host mother during Pre-Service Training noted, Ramadan is much harder than the Catholic tradition of Lent. (I wasn't really sure how to go about explaining that I don't do Lent either, so I just agreed with her.)

Ramadan started while I was in Dakar, but it's a pretty big city and aside from a few things (cab drivers charging more and being less agreeable, witnessing a late afternoon fistfight in a roundabout, lots of Ramadan-related advertisements for dates and coffee and things) it was easy to forget that Ramadan was happening.

There were more people out praying then usual, especially on Friday, which is traditionally the day that everyone wears nicer clothes, and the men and the older women go to the mosque for afternoon prayers. On the first Friday of Ramadan we were walking over to the French Cultural Center at prayer time, and the streets were echoing with the megaphones broadcasting the call to prayer and impressively crowded with people praying or heading to the mosque to pray. I'm not sure why so many people were praying in the streets - maybe there isn't enough space in the mosques? Maybe people run out of time and it's more convenient?

Photo Credit: travelpod.com

In any case, today I'm going to go over to the Kédougou market to buy snacks, a bunch of dates as a seriche gift for my host family, and some gresil. I'm not sure what gresil is but everyone tells me that if you sprinkle it around the outside of your hut it repels snakes. (Side note: Last month I saw a couple snakes in my hut. They didn't hang around and they weren't black mambas or anything, but I'm going to get the gresil anyway.)

Tomorrow (after I go to the post office and hopefully finally finally the guy who has the keys to the cabinet where they keep all the packages will be there and I will be able to pick up my birthday mail) I'll be heading back to Salémata. 

Arrivederci!

Hot Emergen-C

For breakfast on my first morning in the village my host mother served me half of a heavily buttered baguette and a mug of hot, milky, vaguely coffee-flavored sugar. I generally prefer my coffee without powdered milk and twelve teaspoons of sugar, but unnecessary politeness compelled me to drink it anyway. I'd brought a zillion little packets of Starbucks Via (the Cadillac of single-serving instant coffee powders) so the next morning all I really needed was a some hot water, but I didn't really know how to go about saying I wanted to make my own breakfast without offending anyone. I really could have just said that I wanted to boil water and they would have showed me how to use the stove, but instead I explained that "I am not habituated to drinking some milk and so that it does me some pain of the stomach so could I just have some hot water, please?" My host mom said "Oh, for tea?" and I said "Sure!" and then realized that I'd left my tea at the Training Center, along with my belt, phone book, and cell phone charger.

I felt weird bringing out my instant coffee when she'd just gone out of her way to make me tea water, so I poured a Raspberry Emergen-C into my cup and pretended it was Wildberry Zinger.