Deep Fried Soft Shell Blue Crab

A Surprising treat down Grand Popo way.

These guys were beer battered and done in a vegetable oil from a lawn chair in Collin's front yard. Dipped in a quark and citrus dressing with quark from a monestary in Parakou.

Pork and Peron

The pork part is pretty self explanatory.

The peron, on the other hand, is simply gari (dried and ground manioc, a type of potato) bound together with rendered pork fat and seasonings.

Just terrible for the heart, but easily the most palatable of all the amorphous demi-liquids consumed here. Ususally served with sauce (below) or just diced peppers.

Beer: Awooyo

One of the few beers in West Africa that I could imagine an American market for – a rich, hopsy amber that drinks surprisingly light in the heat. Brewed in Togo along with Lionkiller, similarly hard to find.

Pop: Lionkiller

Lemon Lime Orange soda from Togo, tough to find east of Ouidah, and how can you not love that label. Extra point when ordering with the French accented “Ley-onne Key-yeah.”

Meat: Bat

We’ve gotten used to a lot of things around here food wise – buying food out of a plastic cooler on the side of the road, not asking what piece of the animal a given morsel of meat is (not like the chef could tell you anyway) and the general idea that there are more edible animals out there than we initially thought (see: Rat, bush variety). But this one caught us by surprise.

Eric came home one night holding two bats given to him by a friend. As the story was told to us, the friend who lives en brousse had used a slingshot at dusk to fell them and handed them over as a thank you for a social debt outstanding.

We fought off our general dislike of bats long enough to watch the preparation, although did not have the opportunity to partake. Eric swears it tastes like guinea fowl, in itself a more mild chicken. We think we’ll be taking his word for it.

Drink: Coconut & Pineapple Infused Sodabi

If you like Pina Coladas (not to mention getting caught in the rain), you'll love this latest sodabi infusion. For those who don't know, Sodabi is the local palm wine distillation that is the very embodiment of the term "fire water." Normally it is best shot and followed by a big gulp of anything else, that is when its not being used to strip the paint off a car.

But owing to its high alcohol content, it also tends to absorb flavors well. Our friend Chris has been the vanguard of sodabi infusion thus far, producing an excellent coconut drink a few nights back that was similar to a Malibu rum. It was on the back of that bottle we decided to give this a shot:


And it was good. Really did taste like a Pina Colada when drunk over ice. Now how do you suppose we say "little paper umbrella" in Beninese French?

Honey Roasted Peanut Butter

Most know I (Jaren) am a lover of peanut butter and when I realized peanuts are bountiful here (as is time) in Benin, I took the opportunity to make it from scratch.

Two words to describe it: delicious and labor-intensive! It is a five step process that starts with shucking peanuts (harvested by Grandmere of course), followed by roasting the peanuts in the skin to then easily peel the skin off the nuts before roasting them again until golden brown. Once the peanuts look like the peanuts you snack on back home, that’s when you put ‘em through the grinder. The oils ooze out and peanuts become one big glob of deliciousness. To try something new, a little bit of locally-grown honey was added to the final product. “C’est doux”!