Beninese food

My friend Jess visits sometimes on the weekends, and last weekend we ate Beninese food! Even though the point of her visit was to see Antigone at the Comédie Française, after not getting the last minute tickets, Beninese food was definitely not a disappointing second choice—I had been dying to try it! Jess Fell, by the way, spent the last two and a half years in Benin, a small country in West Africa. She was teaching English through the Peace Corps and living in a small village. She was lucky, though, and had running water and electricity (unlike some other volunteers). Anyway, she had been telling me about how delicious "amiwo" is since getting to Paris in September, so I was very intrigued.

Background on Jess: She and I met our last year at Hopkins, after I had gotten back from my semester abroad and she had gotten back from her year abroad. While we were coincidentally both in Paris, we didn't know each other, since Hopkins only has meet-and-greets for people studying abroad immediately before leaving, and Jess left in the fall. We met in Wilda Anderson's class on Dumas and Verne, and then spent our entire second semester writing our senior theses together while idolizing ENS graduates. Needless to say, we've both grown a lot since then, and no longer think the ENS is all it's cracked up to be.

Anyway, after Hopkins, Jess did a year-long teaching assistantship program in France, teaching English in a high school in Bordeaux. I visited her that January and got food poisoning, but at least I got to see Bordeaux in the middle of the worst winter on record...after that, Jess went right off to Peace Corps, learned several African languages, taught English in a village for years, helped an entrepreneur with his project to give electricity to more people, and was otherwise awesome. Now she is a student at France's premiere business school, the HEC. It is located in a little town outside of Paris, called Jouy-en-Josas, and so you can imagine how happy I am to be the closest I've been to Jess in over three years!

Beninese food: AMAZING. Except Jess informed me that there were a few key differences between what we ate and "real" Beninese food. First off, the tomatoes were actual tomatoes and did not taste like "red plastic." Second, the chicken was amazing!! Apparently in Benin, the chickens lead very hard lives, and don't really taste like that. Anyway, I really loved this food. Especially the "piment" (spicy sauce) that was so spicy that we went through several pitchers of water. Anyway, here is a picture of the experience! I'm just happy Jess found a Beninese restaurant in Paris, because I've been trying to find Puerto Rican Mofongo and it hasn't been going so well...