Wherever I travel, I love visiting supermarkets and discovering new products. And although Ivorian supermarkets look very much like French ones, there's one product that caught my attention: dehadryted attikeké. And not only one brand, but several - although Attieké Ivoire seems to be the most popular.

Very similar to couscous but made of cassava instead of wheat, attieké is the most popular staple in Côte d'Ivoire. It's usually eaten with fried fish, that's why a slang acronym has developed to name the combo (which also has a Facebook fan page): APF, attieké poisson frit. Making attieké is very time consuming, since cassava needs to be fermented in water for days, sun-dried, crushed, drained, then dried and winnowed to be steamed. This long process greatly reduce the levels of hydrogen cyanide that cassava contains naturally and which could be poisonous.

Personally, I like attieké although it has a slight sour taste due to the cassava fermentation. That's why I like to eat it with a sauce, and Côte d'Ivoire has many fantastic sauces to offer. However, like any staples made of cassava such as fufu in Central Africa, it has a very low nutritional value so it's not recommended as a daily meal.

One of my favorite things to do in Abengourou is shopping at the food market (no, this town doesn't have a very broad range of entertainment options, so what). And I like to try stuff that I've never eaten before, or ask the women what dishes they make with a certain vegetable. So, naturally, when I spotted some gigantic green beans the other day I was inmediately drawn to them (see picture of one of them next to my hand to see what I mean). The fact they were selling them individually (at 50 FCFA each) should have given me a hint of their evil potency, but I was so excited about my discovery that I bought the whole selection this amused lady had on display. Which meant becoming the proud owner of the 6 or 7 biggest green beans I had seen in my life.

Although the market lady had suggested me to crush the beans into a liquid sauce with onions and mini-eggplants, in my mind they were like any other beans. So one evening I peeled them out of the pods, boilt them and then mixed them with some tomato sauce and rice. At first their taste threw me off, or the lack thereof. They were surprisingly really bland, kind of like eating spoonfuls of dirt, but they had a potent, thick aftertaste that wasn't so bland after all. After drinking a few liters of water to get rid of that unpleasant texture, I went to bed. And an hour or two later my stomach started feeling like a huge rock had been dropped into it, while some green bean nightmares possessed my sweaty body. They were almost like hallucinations in which I desperately ran in fields of oversized, angry potatoes to escape the evil beans under the disapproving gaze of ginormous angry pumpkins. I also had to make frequent visits accross the hall to my beloved toilet, who witnessed the greenest poo ever.

After a horrible sleepless night for work I had to go on a field visit to a village located an hour away from Abengourou, and only Coke saved me from puking beans all over my couterparts' sandals. The thick, sickly taste stayed in my mouth the whole day, in spite of the endless Cokes I ingested like an addict. It was only at 10pm that, not having eaten anything since the night before, I accepted a friend's invitation to have some chicken. And, thank God, the mighty chicken beat the evil beans and I started coming back to life.

Moral of the story: don't trust oversized, evil-looking vegetables (mini-tomatoes and mini-eggplans are delicious, by the way). And don't cook anything you're not familiar with. Unless you want to have nightmares or become acquainted with all the toilets in town.

After trying some alloco on my first day here, this weekend I had quite a full and satisfying experience with more advanced Ivorian cuisine. Here are a few photos of the couple of meals that sent me directly to heaven:

Attieké is a very important staple in Ivorian cuisine, if not the most important one. It's a couscous made of cassava root.

It seems that an Ivorian meal cannot be complete without some fish, and they cook it in all forms. But grilled is of course a favorite, and they really know how to grill it.

This dish is apparently common for breakfast, but I ate for lunch. It's a mix of fish, tomato sauce and eggs.

I think tchep is originally a Senegalese dish, but which is very popular here as well. It's basically fish with a mix of rice, beans, vegetables and sauces.

Snails are apparently very common here and everybody loves them. They are bigger than Spanish or French ones (I heard some of them can weight 400 gr), and they are eaten in skewers or with all sorts of sauces. Apparently they even have their own festival around the 15th of August happening in Ahoué, near Abidjan.

I think fried plantains are eaten all over Africa, and they are always a safe bet when not feeling very adventurous in a new place - I don't think they've ever let me down. So simple, and yet so delicious.

So I was naturally very excited to try alloco, Côte d'Ivoire's own take at fried plantains. Some people told me they put ginger in them, some others chili powder, but in any case they are hot and delicious. And the ones I had today were accompanied by a tasty chili-peanut sauce that I couldn't stop eating even after my tongue had become numb. They are addictive too!

They are usually fried in palm oil and are quite greasy, so it's probably not something you should eat every day but still highly recommended! And they literally have it everywhere, as they are one of the most beloved dishes of Ivorian cuisine. There's even a place in the Cocody neighborhood called the allocodrome which is of course next on my to-do list.

Via the blog A Bombastic Element (which I've been really enjoying lately), I found this wonderful story about Liberian cooking. It's an audio slideshows from the NYT's "One in 8 Million" series, chronicling the heroic and quirky in the lives of everyday New Yorkers.

It features Eliza Smith, 62, a Liberian who immigrated to the US in 1969 who cooks traditional food from her country in her Queens apartment. According to the story intro, her husband, who was from South Carolina and died in 1986, loved her traditional Liberian recipes. So did their friends, and in the mid-1990's, one asked if he could pay her to cook for him weekly. Soon, neighbors and friends of friends were calling, asking if they could come by and eat in her kitchen or take meals home. She also catered weddings, graduations and other parties. She charges $15 to $20 a meal, and sends most of her profits to a Liberian elementary school.

Although the photos by Todd Heisler are in black and white and I would have liked to see the colours of Ms Smith's food - especially the combination of meat and the fish that she says makes Liberian food different and "funky", the story is lovely and well worth checking out. And I loved this quote by Ms Smith which I think can be applied to African cooking in general:

I just can't cook enough for me, I don't know how to do that. I come from a large family, we were 12 kids and when we cook, we cook a lot of food for everyone to have.

About two weekends ago I attended Africa Rising, a party at a new art gallery in San Francisco called Project One described in their website in a way that immediately made me want to go:

Africa’s rich cultural heritage has produced some of the most flavorful food, rhythmic music, and vibrant art in existence. The continent’s influence on other cultures has been profound; there are very few corners of the world which have not been touched in some way by Africa.

If you’ve dreamed about Africa but haven’t yet visited the Motherland, you are invited to sample a spectrum of the best the Diaspora has to offer at “Africa Rising,” a new event combining food, music, art, and fashion – all with an African theme.

The blog Stuff white people like humorously described San Francisco as an ideally diverse city with its perfect balance of whites, Asian and gays. And the truth is that I had oftentimes wondered about the African Diaspora in this area, as it all seemed to be concentrated in the US East coast. So this event was the perfect opportunity to finally find out about the African community in the Bay area, and it didn't disappoint me.

The food was provided by Africa Radio & Kitchen, a popular nomadic restaurant by charismatic chef Eskender Aseged who is originally from Ethiopia. His food is inspired by old world recipes of Mediterranean and Red Sea countries, but there's something about him and his way of seeing food and people that struck me as essentially African. He served the food at the gallery himself, and he took the time to talk passionately about food to everybody that he saw eating, for example about his project to bring a certain type of cheese from Mauritania to San Francisco. He also told us about his vegetable garden in his city apartment, which made me really curious.

On the walls there were all sorts of interesting artwork, such as paintings by Nigerian-born Francis Simeni or an African inspired fashion exhibit by David Timehin who is also half Nigerian. Later on he also had a little fashion show with some of his designs, under his label ican iam (you can see pictures of some of his designs in this post).

I should say that the Project One Gallery is not only an art gallery, but also a lounge bar, with a comfy sitting area, a dancing space and of course, a cocktail bar. So the music was a very important part of the evening. Even more so since the main organizer of the event was Maisha Productions, an entertainment company co-founded by two musicians: Jeremiah Kpoh and Sila Mutungi.

Jeremiah Kpoh is an ecclectic DJ originally from Liberia and Sila Mutungi, who is from Kenya, is the leader of the band Sila and the Afrofunk Experience (I highly recommend to visit their website and to start enjoying their music there). In addition to the Maisha Productions duo, another musician made the attendees vibrate: British-Nigerian singer Siji, who was displaying a cool Cleveland vs. Lagos t-shirt, as well as a very hipster hat as you can see in this picture.

Although I didn't stay until the end since the event was planned to last until 2am and I had to work the next day (and it probably ended even later), I had a blast. I only hope there will be more.

As a side note: while writing this post I discovered that Africa Rising is not just a descriptive common phrase to talk about the current "hotness" of Africa especially in business, but it is also the title of a book by Vijay Mahajan (you can read an excerpt published at Ode Magazine), and also the name of an interesting-looking non profit organization. This post from their blog captures a lot of what I think too:

When a Western charity makes an appeal for funds with the photo of a seemingly helpless African child, the Western donor is cast in the role of the strong, generous, and righteous person helping the lowly and needy. Strength, generosity, and righteousness are all good things, but I fear that an unrighteous pattern has developed. The West and Africa have become type-cast into strong and weak, resourceful and helpless, giver and receiver, parent and child.

To cast whole continents and cultures in such starkly contrasting and fixed roles is an untruth and an injustice. There is strength in Africa, and there is resourcefulness, generosity, and righteousness. Africa Rising exists to make those strengths known, to extend their reach, and to help Westerners move beyond stereotypes of Africa to relationships with Africans.