Kevin in Liberia

Its Purpose: to raise awareness of current social, political, ethical, and spiritual issues within a relief and development context in Liberia. Its effectiveness is simple: It relies on me, the author, to provide insightful, and often debate-sparking material that will encourage you, the reader to get engaged through comment contributions, emails, and promoting others to read, re-think, and respond to the important issues discussed.

I know not which is most profitable to me, health or sickness, wealth or poverty, nor anything else in the world. That discernment is beyond the power of men or angels, and is hidden among the secrets of your Providence, which I adore, but do not seek to fathom. ~ a prayer by Blaise Pascal

Sunday, September 11, 2005

Fish Fries in West Africa

09.10.05

I neglect both blogging and journaling way too much. I just checked the last time I posted anything and it was almost three weeks. Since then here is what has been going on. For the past three Saturdays Ryan and I have gone down to the beach at Silver Beach and have bought fish for our, what seems routine, “fish fries”. We buy the fish directly from the fishermen and cut out the middleman (aka Liberian market women) so we get a pretty good deal on most of the stuff we buy. Our first fish fry that we had we bough a couple fish called Groupers for a total of 100 LD which ends up being about $1.75USD. I'm still trying to figure out whose eyes are bugged out more, the fish's or Ryan's?!? They were really tasty after you ripped off the scales which looked a lot more like dinosaur scales than fish scales. The second fish fry we had was a little more intense. I think I’d rather call it a shark fry because it wasn’t fish we were cooking at all. It was shark. The market women had a bunch of catfish, snake fish, crabs, stingrays, and then this shark. We ended up bargaining her down to like $2.75USD for this shark which was like 3-4 ft long. After taking some pictures and video footage of this beast we proceeded to boil and scrape the sandpaper-like skin off. Once all the rough skin was off we then sawed his head off, pulled the guts out and cut him up into steaks. We made shark tacos with some of the meat and we’ve still got steaks in the refrigerator. It ended up being quite tasty indeed. This last fish fry we had we bought three cassava fish. These little buggers are pretty good. Ryan and I cooked up some caramelized onions in maple syrup mixed with curried couscous and fried cassava fish on top. On the side we had cucumber salad with grated orange peel and yogurt made by Ms. Warpinski of Samaritan’s Purse. For desert I had some roasted garlic in olive oil that ended up getting burnt but still actually really tasty. I’ll miss these fish fries once Ryan leaves. They’re quite the social gatherings and great eating.

The Settlers games have definitely slowed down as of late. I believe we played last weekend which I won. Maybe the winning streaks are returning. The Samaritan’s Purse household, where we usually play Settlers, just got DSTV which is basically a satellite dish. I believe they get numerous channels so apparently we’ll get hockey games and whatnot over there. If ESPN would only play the Canucks then Liberia would be very sweet indeed.

The rollout of QuickBooks as our financial software is in progress and I think its going to be a very useful management tool as well as financial reporting tool. It allows me to print reports where I can see all the entries made by our staff members and actually track how much work they are doing and how long it takes to do their work. It’ll be interesting to see how I can use this to our advantage. Anyways, I’ll leave this post as it is because its getting a tad late here, almost midnight now, and I should be heading off soon.

Ciao.

Kevin

1 Comments:

  • At 1:57 AM, Blogger Gaillie said…

    Fish fries? Hmm...

    Russ wanted to tell you about the barbecue we had at his sister's house. It was salmon marinaded with Bill Gerber's famous marinade recipe. It was the first time Rusty had barbecued the salmon but I think he did a pretty good job. He didn't cook it to a rubbery crisp like some restaurants do

    Does Pork Chop enjoy your fish fries, or does he chew on the bones or what?

     

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