10 October 2011 - Today's email is sponsored by food

Bonjour tout la monde! Comment ca va? (I don't know how to make a cedille accent. Sorry)

So today's email is sponsored by food. It will be the major subject for this one.

What I typically eat at the apartment is just these five ingredients cooked in different ways: ground beef, garlic, onions, peppers and tomatoes. I've really grown to like just those things. We often just eat ommellettes (sp?) with those five ingredients, or a pasta with those things in a sauce, or just those five things and lentils and call it "chili" with fried potatoes. That is predominately what we eat for dinner.

For breakfast, we eat a gateau (sp?) which isn't cake, like it says in your dictionary. It's just a type of bread here. We have Corn Flakes, but only either powdered milk (gross) or sterilized milk (also gross), so I don't usually eat Corn Flakes for breakfast. We always drink a ton of water with breakfast to get our doxycycline down.

We don't eat lunch. Sometimes we get a chocolate gateau (just a kind of chocolate sauce inside of a gateau) or a couple beignets (a special type of fried bread - if you can find a recipe, please please PLEASE email it to me).

Speaking of recipes, do any of you have recipes for the following?

Doughnuts (preferably Grandma Fran's best)
French Toast Sticks
White Cake
Beignets
Other cookies and things

As far as African food goes, I have eaten a couple dishes. The thing I like least is definitely a baton. A baton is manyolk (a type of root of a tree that acts a lot like potatoes and tastes far more bland than potatoes) that is soaked in water for a week and then put into a large leaf and left to like, ferment, for a couple weeks. People eat it like americans eat potato chips, and it's pretty gross...

I have eaten a quem - basically the manyolk leaves ground up and boiled with some spices - often a type of pepper called "pima." Don't listen to anyone when they claim that jalepeno peppers or jabenero peppers are the hottest. Not even close. Pima peppers are the hottest peppers ever. If anyone would like to dilute solutions of all of them and then titrate them for me so we can really know for sure, that would be awesome.

I have also eaten fish - mackerel, to be exact. There are ladies who just sell them off the side of the road. They are actually really good. You get some condiment (african condiment - it's green and tastes like mustard, but not as harsh, and has a different texture) and a little pima and it's delicious. It's often served with plantain chips (also good).

Beans and beignets are also common and delicious. Beignets are a type of bread that is fried, like a doughnut, but doesn't taste like a doughnut. It's kind of thick, often covered in sugar, and is really tasty. Like I said, I would really like a beignet recipe.

I have also eaten this cabbage dish with Befaka at a recent convert's house. Befaka is just smoked fish. I ate cabbage boiled up and then mixed with a sauce. It wasn't bad at all. I didn't like the boiled manyolk though.

I can receive mail here. Here is the address:

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints
Elder LaFleur
B.P. 3171
Douala, Cameroon

I will provide more information when possible. Bon chance!

- Elder LaFleur