A Food Diary

Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything. But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it. Genesis 9:3–4

Food turned into a miracle the day my mother bought ukwa and ukazi and dried fish weeks before I traveled to America to start graduate school in Texas. She laid them on the floor in an empty room in our house in Orlu. I had bought three large purple echolacs, one carrying my clothes and the other carrying my books and the last one carrying all my food; packets of indomie and packs of abacha, potash, ngu and shortbread biscuits. When I arrived America, and when I had settled after months, I cooked the ukwa for hours and it was still hard to eat. When I cried to my mother, she said I should have soaked it overnight and used potash. The next time I was ready to do the cooking marathon again, I soaked and soaked oo, I added potash oo, still, the ukwa came out strong like dried corn.

My mother was good at arranging food, there was food in the store that lasted us for months. The store mostly had rice and yams and stockfish and beans in 50-liter gallons that we stored by throwing dry pepper into the gallons. But she didn’t cook too much. When our relative, Onyebuchi- who was also our house help finished staying with us for seven years, another aunt had told my mother at their August meeting that Onyebuchi said the only thing that my father ate were sardines and toasted bread because my mother didn’t cook too much. Onyebuchi was not all that good, but it was true that my father loved sardines and bread. He only wanted Titus, the one in the golden and red container like a corrugated zinc sheet. He walks to the kitchen sink, washes the tin of sardine before inserting his middle finger into the sling, then pulls it till the salty oil opens. He puts a drop of oil in his mouth as though having a taste would determine if he would continue to use the fish inside, then he throws the lid into the white dust bin by the kitchen door. He wedges the side of the tin with a table knife and pours the oil into the sink until there was no single oil in the tin anymore. While arching inwards and facing the gas stove, he uses a fork to press down the fish until it is severely mashed. He mixes the mashed sardines with the low-cholesterol butter and reaches for the large loaf of bread lying in the middle of the dinning table. When he tucks the butter and sardine mix in-between the slices of the bread that he had sliced by himself, he notices that the half current cannot carry the bread toaster, then he asks me to start the generator. It is raining, but not heavily. I take the umbrella, and head to the generator house.

My mother does not cook too much, but when she cooks vegetable soup, she invites sweet air into the whole bungalow. The pounded ukazi smells like medicine; she asks me to pound it in the small mortar until it is wet. We break snails and remove the shells. It surprises me how snails don’t have blood. You kill a living thing and there is no blood in that living thing. What is then the meaning of living? We wash away the slimy feel of the dead snails with alum and garri and then they are clean like something you would eat raw. She makes the semolina herself, asking me to pour the powder in the boiling water while she stirs round and round on the stove until the semolina thickens.

I did not eat as much as my siblings ate. I removed the back of akara before I could eat it. I did not like eggs. In primary school, I had visited an aunt whose very rich jollof rice made me run out of their parlor to vomit outside. My mother rushed behind me the moment I ran out. She kept patting my back until I threw all the saliva in my mouth out. She called my other cousin to bring me a cup of water to rinse my mouth. She also asked my aunt to give me avomai to drink. I told everyone I was sick and had some malaria before coming, even though my mother struggled to understand why I was talking about a malaria that she had no idea of. When we got home and she parked her Mazda and we were walking into the parlor, she held my hand like she didn’t want us to enter the house.

“Chimee, oya tell me the truth, why did you vomit that food?” She asked. “Do you really have malaria?”

I shook my head.

We did not use a lot of pepper to cook because my mother’s ulcer said no; she was so sick when the ulcer hit her. The bones in her neck came out and she wore bold necklaces to hide them. She was always saying the rosary. When she was fine after months, we went to St. Martin’s for thanksgiving, offering to God and the Reverend father- crates of egg and yams and toilet paper and two adult broilers. We then sacrificed our taste buds to be pepper’s enemies, but my aunt’s meal was full of pepper, undone tomatoes that hung in my throat. I wanted to sneak to the kitchen and throw everything into the dust bin the moment I had the second spoon, but it was in the parlor and everyone was watching me and the house help roamed the corridors as though she kept something there.

Aunty Akunna was my mother’s friend teaching Integrated Science in the same secondary school where my mother taught Fine Arts. Her egusi was different from all the egusi that I have eaten all my life. It smelled like dried fish and cooked beef. I heard she stopped marrying her husband a long time ago but the man still came on weekends to eat her egusi. She cooked the egusi without vegetables, just plain egusi with all the collection of proteins- fish and meat, and didn’t add any vegetables. She put everything in the refrigerator and then each time it was time to eat egusi, she cut a lot of ugu and poured into the ration for that day. Her soup was always new. Her dinner around August was mostly boiled corn from her farm and pear from Orie market.

My mother cooked jollof rice in a way that I did not entirely like. Her jollof was not the same with the ones she brought back from their Nigerian Union of Teachers’ meeting. The NUT one was almost red, as though the cooks have added color. The ones we made at home seemed like they lacked those red bell pepper. My mother liked her rice soft, like a melting sugar.

I realized it was not the best way to cook jollof until I came to America and was consumed by Youtube videos of Sisi Yemmie and Flo Chinyere. Those women have turned my life around in the kitchen. Flo Chinyere’s video on cooking vegetable soup in the abroad saved me, although while I made the vegetable soup- with frozen kale and lettuce and spinach, many things were missing. It was very far from my mother’s vegetable soup, but I still neared the smell. I did not pound ukazi or have snails. They were costing $60 the last time I checked an online African store. Back to my jollof, now I do not boil my rice halfway and set aside, I make the tomato sauce, frying everything until its dry-dry, then I wash the raw rice in water and pour it into the tomato sauce that has now become like the stew for plain rice. I pour in water the level of the rice and cover with an aluminum foil, with the lowest of the lowest of heat. When everything is done after like 1 hour and 30 minutes, the jollof is sparse and has the light smell of bay leaves spread atop. I have Ike appear into my apartment, stuffing jollof in his mouth and asking for more because it has entered his medulla. He comes the next day, transporting it with sprite.

My first-time eating blood from meat was at Texas Road House, a swanky restaurant in the middle of El Paso. Where I come from, we don’t eat blood, the book of Genesis says no to blood, but here I am, flanked by my friends. It was not easy to say the words- medium rare or rare or well done. I did not say well done, that was why the large chunk of steak was sitting in front of me, with patches of blood, waiting for me to munch.

The day I entered the car with my two friends to eat dinner at Rib Hut, I did not know that I was going to have the day of my life inside that slim hall that seemed like a large corridor. I started to fall in love with the waiter. I gawked at the way that he cleaned, smiled, asked us if we wanted water with ice or without ice. A man who has just finished eating on the other table passed, greeted us, wiping his mouth with large napkins. He said we should try the rib Plata. He said it was the best thing he had this year. He kissed the air and walked out of the hall like a happy child with balloons. We ordered this Plata, a shiny meal at that. Served in our front, it smelled and tasted like suya, meaty and juicy that the oil from the ribs tasted like something that has blended with sugar or honey. I ate all the ribs until my stomach was asking me to stop. It was like the day I went to eat at Olive Garden and the alfredo sauced pasta was a miracle. It was served with a large bowl of house salad filled with croutons. Those croutons were not for me. They were not things I wanted to go into my stomach. It tasted like chin-chin that breeze has entered in. I took the croutons away and put them aside in a white saucer and they laid there until we left the restaurant. But the pasta captured me. When I got home, I went inside the Walmart app to buy shrimps and cheese and garlic and whipping cream and fettucine pasta to make something similar to what Olive Garden offered me. It went well but the pasta was too heavy in my mouth as though I was swallowing thick ropes. The cheese did not melt well. It tasted like melted butter. Cheese was not my good friend until I attended N’s graduation party and ate mac and cheese at one of the biggest hotels in El Paso, then I remember my mother’s voice the day we were arguing about western things and I told her cheese was a nightmare and she said she wouldn’t be surprised the day I land in America and cheese will grab me.

“You will be the one to call me nah” She said. And it is happening now. I am in the kitchen and I am calling with my brother, J, and my friends Ike and then Chi, another Chi, and then J, and then my cousin Chiazam or Ikenna. I am talking to them and they are keeping me busy while I clink utensils and while I mute myself to blend tomatoes and fry them until my food is ready.

“Chimee, all these things you are cooking, still you don’t get fat, you don’t add any weight” One friend will say in Igbo

“That is what you don’t get. I don’t always eat o.” I will respond. Then I start speaking with my mother on WhatsApp and she rolls in laughter the moment I tell her about my new found love for mac and cheese. We will be on the call oo, until she stops to talk and I notice she has dozed off for the night in Nigeria while it’s still 3pm in America.

But these days I find joy in just standing there, the sink in front of me, washing plates and pots. I have never used the dishwasher before. It’s always there, waiting for me to use it, but I know it’s going to increase my monthly water rate from 50 to 100, so I just stay far away from it. It just stays there to design my kitchen.

The night before I was going to fry puff puff and bake vanilla cake with YouTube directions in front of me, I had a dream that my mother would call a malaria dream. In the dream, I came back tired from where I don’t know. I wanted to eat bread, then I reached for the container of the Nigerian Blue Band butter I had bought for $23 and seen that it was empty. I knelt down and cried, then I woke up. I stood up, filled with joy that this was a dream. I walked to the kitchen shelf where I had kept the butter to be sure this dream was really a dream. The butter reminded me of our house in Orlu, how my mother dug a table knife into the container, wearing glasses to spread in our bread by herself so we don’t finish it before the end of the month by drinking it like water.

I am happy because I had ordered oranges from Walmart to console myself from the pain of burning two curbs of corn from the oven the day before. The oranges had no seeds, but they were sweet that I could not resist. After peeling them, I put them in the fridge and brought it out to eat. I went back to the Walmart app that I have used to order to tip $3 for the driver who dropped my oranges, this stranger driver that I do not know, for dropping balls of sweetness in front of my door.

Recently, when it dawns on me every day the many ways that straight people who hate gay people have the sole aim of existing to end people who do not look like them, to stop the happiness of other human beings, to shrink humanity, to oppress humanity. Asides facing my work, asides going to the gym to carry metals and run in the treadmill as though someone was chasing me, I run to food. I run to cut lettuce and tomatoes mixed with mayonnaise and honey and like my father’s sardine procedure, I stuff them in between two slices of bread and throw into my mouth while drinking milk and milo, then joy will appear in front of me, staring at me like my brother, asking me to increase the volume of Beyonce’s HEATED.

Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.

Revelation 3:20