Food of Life

So it’s another day in the kitchen for me (I think I should start a series for these things). Today I decided to cook the food of life, popularly known as Jollof rice and beans. I call it the food of life because that’s what my dad calls it whenever my mom cooks it and I don’t blame him because when my mom does it, it’s indeed the food of life but when I do, lol.

Anyways I got all of my ingredients ready and started by selecting my beans. By selecting the beans I mean separating the dirts and stones in the beans from the actual beans. Truth be told, I do feel that the people who package these beans in the bag intentionally add these stones in it in other to fill it up and make it feel heavier, therefore giving people the impression that there is a lot of beans in the bag not knowing that a quarter of it is just stones. I say this because of the amount of stones I actually selected from this beans, enough to build me a small bungalow.

After selecting the beans, I started to boil it. I needed it to be a bit soft before I make my stew for the jollof. Some of you might be wondering how I seem to know what I was doing today. Well it’s all thanks to my mom. That woman made sure I learned how to cook the food of life whether I wanted to or not.

I remember the first time she asked me to cook jollof rice and beans, she had burst into my room one early morning when she was about going out to the market to buy goods for her shop and just started rapping out everything I needed to buy to cook it and also the procedures. I was responding to all she was saying but I wasn’t hearing anything. When I later woke up that morning, I had to go on Google for some assistance and I ended up adding more salt than necessary because Google doesn’t actually tell you the accurate amount of salt you need.

Now back to my cooking..

When I noticed that the beans was beginning to get a bit soft, I added my raw rice in it and waited for both of them to boil a bit before bringing it down to make my stew. The stew was a bit easy for me because I’ve done it countless times in the past, I got the necessary ingredients, fried my tomatoes and pepper and then just added every ingredient I had with me before adding some water in it and allowing it to boil for a bit before pouring my white rice and beans into it.

And now as I write this, I wait for it to boil and be ready to eat, I just hope that I didn’t mess up anything especially the salt part because that is where I always get it wrong.

_{Photo by Pixzolo Photography}

_{I would have loved to take a picture of the actual food but with all of the gas explosion news flying around, I’m too scared to take my phone close to my gas cylinder while it’s still on.}