A Ghanaian Breakfast

Because I've never lived in the UK, and my only visit there was to see a Ghanaian who did not feed me the english breakfast in the mornings, I wasn't quite sure what is meant by the term english breakfast. So yesterday I googled it. Here's what I found:

Once I'd started googling, I followed that by googling "american breakfast". The photos that came up confirmed the idea I had of it from my college days when we were fed pancakes, scrambled eggs, french toast, hash browns, waffles, toast, fruit salads, etc for breakfast. The photos are below:

So guess what I did next? Yup, you guessed right. I googled "ghanaian breakfast" and found Oto with eggs, and a cut tuber of yam as shown in the picture below. For real?! Which dadaba ( a kid with a rich father; rich fathers are dadas) or egyaba (kid with poor father; poor fathers are egyas) eats ɛtɔ for breakfast? Shiee!

So I asked myself, well, what does a traditional Ghanaian breakfast look like? Hmm. What did I expect? Milo and sugar bread with blue band margarine spread on it? Hausa kooko and koose? Auntie Azumi's waakye that the masons used to eat in the mornings? They used to call it "concrete" or Daavi's yor ke gari that I would sometimes buy when I was in kindergarten way back in the day at Aboso in the late 80s, or Nkyekyerewa?

Aboa bɛn so ne Nkyekyerewa (tr: What kind of animal is Nkyekyerewa you ask?) Hmm, some animal I bought in traffic this morning so I could write about one traditional Ghanaian food that can be had for breakfast. I had it for the first time a couple of weeks ago, when out of curiousity I bought the suspicious-looking food wrapped in leaves. Just the fact that its main wrapping is biodegradable is enough reason to buy it.

The seller put it in a plastic bag and gave it to me. See photo


When the plastic holder is removed, you see the Nyekyerewa in all its glory
Then I took off the string and the leaf covering to reveal the boiled and compressed corn and boiled groundnuts (peanuts).

Next I took off everything to reveal the part that's meant to be eaten

Then breakfast begun:)
And ended

There you go. That's a Ghanaian breakfast! How does it taste? Just like corn on a cob, except without the cob. It was warm, and it tasted great to me. If I had my own way, I'd have more groundnuts on it than mine came with but for how little it cost (30 pesewas), what is there to complain about? It was very filling and very tasty. I wonder if it would "go square" (tr: taste great) with a piece of dried kube (coconut), just like boiled corn usually "jɔms" (tr:tastes great) with kube. So maybe it was a bit too high on carbs, and a little too low on the protein, but hey, who is complaining?

What do you typically have in your homes for breakfast? My mother makes a roasted corn+roasted groundnuts+roasted beans mix which she mills into a flour, then mixes with water and boils to make a kooko (tr: someone shd please supply the english name for kooko...broth?) It's brown, much like what people call "Tom Brown" (where did the name tom brown come from?) but she calls it "weanimix". We would eat it with milk (yes, ideal milk, which i found out this morning has no cow milk in it at all...have you read the label?). Weanimix +milk+butter bread (also known as ɛnkɔdaa wɔ fie*) + home-made groundnut paste ( peanut butter)...that was enough to take us through the morning till break time! There was no bacon or ham for us when we were growing up. Speaking of bacon, my little brother Ato Kwamena (he's twelve) asked me the other day..."Maame Esi, what is bacon?" How I laughed!? I laughed because the poor guy pronouced the ba (as in back or barrack) and the con as in (conman). After I'd finished laughing, I told him what bAcOn was, and reassured him that he's several steps ahead of me since I didn't know what bacon was either at his age.

note: ɛnkɔdaa wɔ fie (tr: there are children at home) or maame o dendei (welcome home, mummy) are alternative names for butter bread. The astute bread hawkers invented the names as a marketing strategy to sell bread to travellers. In Ghana, it is common for a visitor (whose visit, by the way, is often not annouced before the person shows up) to bring along a small gift and butter bread is an adequate gift. This is a caution to those who have forgotten; Please don't go to your villages without taking along some benz bread:) lol. I should do a special blog entry on Ghanaian breads:) This is too much fun!