Even more lelenga

Saturday, July 25
Today at market, we bought enough obikola (cassava) and dried coconut so we could make lelenga on our own. We're still waiting for the chairman to build our outdoor kitchen, but we are continuing to move up the learning curve. Today, we did all of the preparation of the lelenga by ourselves. We peeled and scraped the obikola, then we scraped the coconuts. I knew that we weren't supposed to add much water so the coconut milk would be strong (unlike when I cook rice), but I wasn't sure how much. So I took a glass of water and a heaping BIG bowl of scraped coconut in search of a neighbor to help. I found Melissa, one of the ladies who occasionally helps us. She laughed at me, then told me that the water in the cup was just right for the amount of coconut I had scraped, but that if I used all of that coconut my lelenga would be "gris fo gud" (really greasy). So, we squeezed the coconut milk and boiled it, and when I tasted it, the coconut milk reminded me of my great-grandmother's famous coconut cake (which I've never been able to make to my satisfaction). Then we sliced our bananas and got ready to go over to Auntie Sarah's kitchen. You need to know that this took us 4-5 hours with only a break for some lunch. Lelenga takes a long time, but I anticipate we will speed up with more practice.

Auntie Sarah showed up just as we were getting ready to come to her house. So, we all traipsed over to her kitchen, and she built up the fire around the stones to preheat. I remembered how to heat up the banana leaves, and I learned the word for "shiny" which I recognized from singing the Magnificat every evening. You know the leaf is ready when the intense heat makes it shiny. I haven't quite mastered the technique of removing the majority of the thick stem from the leaf, yet. We had plenty of coconut cream left over, so I was able to leave some of it for Auntie Sarah to cook her haleav. As we layered the ingredients into our pans, Auntie asked if we wanted our lelenga for dinner tonight or breakfast in the morning, and I asked which was better. She said it would be sweeter if we left it all night, so we did!