Beans and Rice

When I was a little girl, my family read every book in the series “Little House on the Prairie.” I also watched every episode of the TV series. So, when I moved to Africa, I figured I was all set to survive in the wild. Churn butter? No problem. Bake over a fire? I got it. But I didn’t really have to do any of those. However, I did have to cook food with the meager supplies available in the local market. My husband is not a cook, so it was up to me to keep us alive for two-and-a-half years.

To the Market

But that’s smooth sailing for a girl raised on the deep knowledge offered under the tutelage of Caroline “Ma” Ingalls. So, once we settled into our house in the small town of Keren, I grabbed my newly purchased woven market basket and headed out to find ingredients.

I met Tewolde who owned a little shop on the corner of one of the streets in town. This handy shop was the closest I was gonna get to a grocery store. It offered countless cans of tomato paste, milk powder, flour, sugar, beans, and other basic supplies. I became friends with Tewolde because he could speak a little bit of English, and was very kind to me. He was my main shopping stop for pantry goods.

Longing

Tewolde liked to greet me and ask how things were going. And he always sent a word of greeting home to Kris as well. “Tell Kris I am longing for him,” Tewolde would say. On the outside I would smile and assure him that I would. On the inside I would chuckle to myself and look forward to going home so I could tell my husband, “Oh, and Kris, Tewolde says he is longing for you.”

We laugh at this, but I know that I probably have said SO MANY awkward things in the languages that I have studied. So: props to Tewolde for branching out and trying his English phrases.

At Tewolde’s store, early on, I found that he had a very large bag of beans. He could scoop them out and sell by the kilo. As I mentioned, I had to find ways to keep us alive. Beans and rice seemed like a good idea. (I suddenly pictured myself in a calico dress with a matching bonnet, whipping up dinner on the wild frontier.) 

I’d never made beans and rice FROM SCRATCH. But I’m sure Caroline Ingalls did it all the time. And if she could, so could I. I had no idea what kind of beans they were. The shape was not like a kidney bean, nor the color. They were a little green, but not like a pea. I requested a kilo. 

If Tewolde raised his eyebrow, I didn’t notice. Probably because I was  looking forward to his instruction to tell Kris that he was longing for him. Tewolde tied up a little baggy full of a kilo of beans and I handed him the money.

After my grocery shopping trip, I returned home. I figured that any dry bean could be cooked by soaking them in water and then cooking them in my pressure cooker. But I never got around to it. The bag of beans sat on the bottom shelf of our kitchen cupboard for many weeks.

Oh, Is That What They Are?

After those many weeks, we’d been living in Keren long enough to have attended many coffee ceremonies. During these ceremonies, the rich beverage is made from scratch, and I mean that…every time…coffee is made from the beginning. Good coffee begins with the unroasted dried coffee bean. Yep, the not-kidney-bean-shaped and not-pea-green-colored bean. That first week in Keren, “Jana Ingalls” had fancied herself a cook-from-scratch kind of gal and purchased two pounds of coffee beans to cook for dinner and serve over rice!

For the sake of this blog post, I wish I’d have actually attempted to do so. But, alas, each day I chose something else to cook, until the day I found the bag of beans in the cupboard and realized they were coffee beans. At least I had a large supply of beans with which to practice my coffee making skills.

And Tewolde, well, he was probably smiling at me on the outside and laughing at me on the inside.