I had a lovely birthday this month. And I had an even lovelier time of celebrating it. The day itself was a normal work day and I was out visiting some ladies who are such a joy to me. A few days later I celebrated with my friend Christi since her birthday is just a couple days after mine. I told her and her husband that I would buy all the ingredients and all the food items for a party. They would just have to cook it. Fufu was on the menu!!
Fufu is eaten all over Ghana. In different areas they use different foods. In Accra, they use plantain, cassava and yam or two out of the three. In Tamale, they use only fufu, which I have found to be my favorite. And in northern areas they use yam to cook it as well.
They boil the yams and then they pound the life out of it using a pistol and mortar. Since this party was going to be big, instead of all of the work of pounding, we took the boiled yam to a fufu pounding machine. It did all the hard work for us. It was fast and got the job done without any of us sweating. JOY!!
When they put the fufu in the bowls, which I wondered where they found all these bowls, the woman will beat it with her fist just a little bit to smooth it out and then they poured a soup on it. My choice was Light soup with goat meat. SO DELICIOUS!!! It really is like the largest bowl of mashed potatoes you will ever eat.
I baked a cake and brought candles so after our fufu feasting they watched as Christi and I blew out the candles. There were 25+ people who passed by and “chopped” with us. JOY!! (The evening started out with rain but we ended up being thankful for it otherwise they think more people would have come and we had just enough food as it was. JOY!!) I was able to see my youth girls who I used to do a Bible study with. They sang happy birthday to me which was sweet.
It was one of those times where you drive home with a full heart (and full belly), being satisfied, even though, it is not necessarily a physical satisfaction, but more of a sense of wonder that experiences like this come my way. JOY!!
