Cooking with Rose

Rose has shown me how to cook two kinds of soup, ground nut soup and palm nut soup. "Ground nut" is another term for peanut and the soup is made from peanut butter, tomatoes, onion, garlic, ginger, and water. Most people would also add fish or meat but due to my vegetarian diet, we added eggplant and carrot. We purchased all the ingredients from a small local store nestled in the various family compounds of Goi.

We also cooked some palm nut soup, a process that takes some serious arm muscle strength. Rose brought along a small pestle and mortar and ground the palm nuts from looking like this....

to looking like this....

After pounding the nuts, Rose added water to the nut pulp, strained it and repeat. She put onion, garlic, ginger, red pepper, and tomato to the pestle and pounded it into a puree. She added it

to the pot and after boiling, it turned into....

palm nut soup.