America

written Sunday, 25 November 2007

 

I came up to Tamba on Wednesday to celebrate real Thanksgiving with other volunteers.  Thursday afternoon we all started working on making Thanksgiving food with locally-available ingredients (and with a little help from food packages from our families).  I was making my Thanksgiving potluck usual, pea casserole, with canned peas from the toubab store and those crunch onion things for the topping from a package from my parents.  But the cream of mushroom soup part was a challenge - I've always just used the canned stuff before, but of course that isn't available here.  And I hadn't wanted to ask my parents to mail some because the weight would make it really expensive.  So I'd decided to make that part from scratch, with canned mushrooms (from the toubab store), milk, and flour.

 

Mixing it up to the consistency of cream of mushroom soup turned out not to be very hard at all.  But to get it to taste right... hmm.  What spices to use?  We have a limited, somewhat random selection at the Tamba house.  I gave people tastes of my soup mixture and asked them what spices I should add.  My taste-testers inevitably said, "Well, what do you want it to taste like?"

 

"Like home," I said.

 

Which inspired me with my newest great business idea:  a spice mix called "America" that would be marketed to expats with the slogan, "Just a few sprinkles, and your food will taste just like home."

 

I told the other volunteers about my brilliant idea, and they said, "Great.  But what spices will be in it?"

 

I have no idea.  But if I ever figure that out, I'll be a millionaire.