Cooking diaries - Crème Brûlée & Paella

True to character, my need to cook surfaced all of two days after our arrival in Kayes. We have access to a gas oven, which I thought would be a dream, except that it proved exceptionally difficult to do (more later). I decided my challenge would be to make paella for dinner and crème brûlée for dessert. Let’s run through the issues at hand in Kayes:

-forget fresh dairy. Milk is powdered and cream dosent exist unless you milk a goat and churn it yourself. Considering the elevated risk of brucelloses (a harmful bacteria), I thought it best not to chance it. So we made concentrated milk.

-if you want chicken, you have to go to the chicken market and pick out a chicken. They then kill it and clean off the Feather for you. However, the birds here just don’t have the same kind of meat on them as at home. A chicken breast is about the size of a St-Hubert chicken finger.
Leyla and I went to the chicken seller for the meat tthe night of our meal, and watching the beheading (and subsequent last dash of the headless bird - this is NOT an urban legend) was enough to remind me of why I was a vegetarian for so long. On the other hand, there is something very powerful that occurs when you connect with your food in a most basic way; it reminds us that there is a very real cost to our gluttony and to acknowledge the loss of life associated. It was both humbling and touching: it goes without saying that despite our being 12, we only had 2 chickens killed.
If only everyone’s appetite were limited by their tolerance for bloodshed.

-the final obstacle to our cooking fiesta lay within the cookware (or lack thereof). All dishes are made in large enamel tubs here (so obviously my little ramequins from home weren’t sitting on the shelves. We therefore needed to use a metal bowl too deep in an improvised bain-marie.
Necessity is the mother of invention, after all, so that night was highly creative.

The girls and I got working as soon as we got in. The crème brûlée needed to be ice cold, so we started early. The eggs here for some reason have fragile yolks, so instead of wiski 12 yolks, we wound up with 12 whole eggs, and we could look forward to a very firm crème brûlée. Leyla nearly lost her eyebrows when she tried to light the stove, as we had not figured out whether to light the top or bottom burner. Needless to say, mystery solved now! J
The oven cooked unevenly and the surface of the flan was scorched despite all our efforts and the dessert was tossed into the freezer to cool down for a few hours. Freezers here are about 2-3 degrees lower than our fridges, so you can imagine that the fridge would have been quite ineffective.

We moved on to the paella.

Leyla and Laurence prepped the onions and garlic and began sauteing them, and I got started on the chicken.
Thus began the madness...

Our dear butcher had not gutted the chickens, just cleaned the OUTER part. Aside from the fact that they were still warm for their former lives, I squirmed when I reached for the bird’s head and my fingers groped something grainy and gritty.

I forgot about the stomach. Ew. One thousand Ews.

It was, however a magnificent opportunity to engage in an impromptu dissection, and that is exactly what we did, taking turns and facing our fears. Jenny had the time of her life facing her fear of blood and guts (especially with having the pull the ribcage apart to access the intestines!) and after an hour or so, the chickens were deconstructed, meat removed, cleaned and the remains discarded with great pomp and ceremony.

The paella was made in the oven and came out quite well, despite the fact that I found it lacked its usual kick, most probably because we didn’t have the usual shrimp, mussels and sausage to top it with; it would make sense, wouldn‘t it? The girls liked it, however, and we made homemade flatbread and salsa to balance out the flavors.

For dessert, we sprinkled the crème brûlée with granulated sugar, lit the broiler and hoped for the best. The broiler flame however, was too far from the immensly tall bowl to caramelize and so the sugar half melted and the pudding came out piping hot.

But hey, let’s face it, we made CRÈME BRÛLÉE in AFRICA.

So all things taken into perspective, it was a success, and either way, we were happy to eat something other than goat and couscous.