My Fatima and cooking

07.20.2010

I have big gaps in my education and one area is cooking. I like cooking and try to figure out how to do it using cooking books and the occasional cooking demonstration, but in reality there are areas that are dangerous for me. One of them is fish. I try from time to time and my family bears with me with no comment. Otherwise I just buy the already filleted, battered and frozen variety which only needs to be put into the oven for a while before eating it. But you can not find that here, the prepared frozen variety I mean. Otherwise the Nigerians are big fish eaters and there are lots of fish available: Giwan Ruwa(Niger Perch), African Salmon, Roga Rowa and their big favourite Catfish and Tilapia.

Fatima reading my cooking books in the kitchen door

My cleaning lady, also a Fatima, I discovered, is a trained cook. She took over one day when she saw me trying to debone a chicken, which I thought I was doing well. I was reluctant as I knew the Nigerian way to cut up a chicken was to just bash it with an ax right through the bones leaving splinters of bones in the meat. However her deft professional cut convinced me that I have a professional in my house. She went to cooking school in Lagos and her mother was a good cook from whom she learnt a lot. We cooked the chicken stock together and I realised that this lady knows a lot more than I do. She agreed with much laughter to give me cooking lessons once a week.

I had my first cooking lesson this morning. Yes you’ve guessed it: scaling, filleting and preparing….. fish. A whole Croaker to be exact. And now I’ve got the most delicious clean deboned fillets, waiting in the fridge to be cooked for supper, covered with lots of garlic, lemon, fresh coriander and parsley and whole crushed pepper. Yummy. (After report: Nick thought it delicious, I thought it was a bit on the dry side.)



More about Fatima: She is a cleaner by extraordinaire. So unlike the general Nigerian workmen she does everything super thoroughly. I’ve never had a cleaning lady (with all due respect to Evelyn, Lindsay, Dora and Sylvia) who actually upturn furniture when she cleans and leave the house in the afternoon with every cupboard and drawer in the house neatly cleaned and packed, including the fridge. How she does it I do not know. I got a clue for the reason for this when my Namibian friend Revival told me she actually sacked her first cleaning lady because of the dust on everything. That was before she realized you cannot keep the dust off surfaces for longer than a half an hour during the months of the dry Harmattan winds. These cleaning ladies are trained by the Harmattan.



With that kind of work ethic, needless to say Fatima does not have a high regard for her fellow countrymen and more specifically those who have to keep this building in decent working condition. She knows every fault in the building, how it should be fixed and the whole history of how long the different occupants have struggled with leaking pipes, broken window handles, gaps in the walls and doors that do not fit.

She is also a valuable and willing informant of everything you need to know. Currently there is a bad sewage smell invading the apartment from time to time. Fatima informed me that everyone is complaining, and that the health department is looking into it but they cannot find the culprit. There is a small river flowing between our building and the next building which is currently being built in the slow Nigerian fashion. I’ve got a strong suspicion that that is where it comes from. Their shack toilet is a lean to on the bordering wall to the river and looks dubious. Maybe the problem will disappear once the building is finish; however that may still take a while. Taking a walk yesterday, in this more posh area of an already posh by Nigerian standards city, we realized that the sewage smell problem is probably more wide spread, as you get a whiff of it every now and then. (Two days later…the smell is gone at last. They must have found the culprit!!!!)

I guess the solution is to just close your window when it gets too bad, turn on the aircondition and spray air freshener….. Fatima’s solution.

From my kitchen door