Burgers and ice cream

The last couple of days have been filled with culinary adventures. On Thursday, Phil and I decided to try and make ice cream. We got all of the necessary ingredients—powdered milk, sugar, vanilla flavoring, rock salt, ice—then set to making it work. I was a little unsure of powdered milk in place of real milk or cream, but I figured it couldn’t hurt. We mixed up a batter and poured it into a couple of clear plastic bags, making sure not to fill them too much so there would be ample surface area. Then these we placed in a small cooler with crushed ice and rock salt.

Then we shook it. We shook it hard. We shook it until our clothes were spattered with salty water and our arms were sore. But when we opened it up, lo and behold, our concoction had frozen into what tasted legitimately like ice cream. We quickly ate it up and made the second batch.

This discovery gives Douentza a whole new leg up. I mean, you can’t even get ice cream in Sevare, you have to go all the way to Bamako. But now? Now ice cream can happen with less money and a bit more work right here in our own courtyards. It was a beautiful moment.

We hung out the rest of the afternoon, playing ladder ball and listening to music. We ate some delicious beans and chege (crushed manioc) for dinner, then I went home. I had kind of a sinus headache and it was hot, so I took a Nyquil and got 10 delicious hours of sleep.

I woke up the next morning to Phil bringing over a kilo of a raw meat to put in the fridge. It was sheep burger day. I showered then spent the morning working on my grammar (having insights about adjectives), then at noon, I packed up the meat and went to Phil’s house.

We drove over to where the Norwegian missionaries live, since apparently they have a meat grinder. I hadn’t seen Katie (the woman) in quite some time, but when we pulled into their compound, she came and greeted us warmly, ushering us into her backyard for water and cake. They have a very nice house, and they need it with four little kids and living here for 8 y ears. Everything is screened in with electricity and running water and homey furnishings. She fed us chocolate cake and coffee cake that tasted amazing. We chatted for a while, and I met her husband, whom I hadn’t met before. Then we asked her about her meat grinder for sheep burgers and she just laughed and showed us inside.

When I pulled out the bag of meat, both she and her cook (a Dogon woman) were like, “Sheep meat, eh? That is filet mignon right there.” I was a bit surprised. They were skeptical about making burgers with filet mignon meat, so we decided to cover all of our bases and grind half of it and make kebabs out of the other half. I guess Phil forgot to ask his butcher that morning what animal the meat was from, but hey, 4 dollars for 2.2 pounds of filet mignon ain’t half bad.

After grinding it, we went back to Phil’s house to finish out the mission. This is when we noticed that his grill we were intending to use had a very wide mesh, good for grilling whole legs of things but bad for grilling burgers. Phil disappeared for a while, so I marinated the kebab pieces, then he reappeared touting a large piece of chain-link fence that apparently his neighbors gave him. We laid it on top of the other grill, but still it seemed a bit wide still. I tried putting the burger on two kebab skewers on top of the metal mess, but it didn’t seem to be grilling all that well over the wood fire.

Finally, we got out the tortilla pan and just put it over the fire, cooking both burgers and the two kebabs all at once. We put the burgers on some bread with slices of tomatoes and sure enough, they were delicious. They weren’t made of sheep, but they were burgers, and they tasted great. I was so full I didn’t even taste the kebabs; Phil ate them both.

After gorging ourselves on a kilo of meat, we went for a hike, across some empty millet fields and up onto some nearby rocks. It was a nice walk, but I was incredibly thirsty by the time we got back since we didn’t bring any water.

We went back to my house then and we both worked on a computer: me on my grammar and Phil on his great American novel. We went to the market around 9:30 for a dinner of salad and fried plantains and fresh yogurt that cost less than a dollar. I’m going to miss that.

And now it’s the last day of February. Hard to believe. Tomorrow is March, and that’s only two calendar months away from when I come home. Time is going quickly now.