I am working on an outdoor kitchen where I can prepare small boney fish, invasive carp, groundhog and roadkill the way we did it in the Congo. You could call it smoking the fish or meat over an open fire, but it is more like drying it to preserve it. Sunfish bones become so brittle that you can eat them like potato chips. I was a happy man when after a test run, one grandson said that the fish eyes were the best part.
Through the effort I am reliving the days when we ran the rivers of the Congo Basin rainforest with a small team. The day before departure, I would get someone to cook a big pot of “pondu” (dried fish, pounded manioc leaves and unrefined palm oil eaten with manioc loaves). During the first day of travel, the pot sat unrefrigerated at the bottom of the dugout canoe. That evening, we would thoroughly boil away any microbes and dig in. It was delicious. On the evening of the second day, after again sterilizing it on the campfire again, it was ok. On the third evening, following the same process, it was sour but edible. At that point, I gave away whatever was left in the big pot.
On one trip through the forest with Hap we purchased a small antelope from a hunter. We never had coolers or ice. What we couldn’t eat we dried on a fire, but since we were traveling around, we did not have the time to thoroughly dry the meat over the fire. Parts of it were ok, but other parts questionable. After cooking it you forked the chunks of meat in the pot, looking for the hard ones because the soft ones were rotten.
When we lived in the Congo, every dry season we used to go up the Likouala aux Herbes River from Epena, camp on a sand bar and fish for a few days. The first time it was just our family. Naturally, while catching mwenge (african pike), ngolo (catfish) and mongusu (snakeheads) we got competitive. One day, Josie caught a big mongusu which we dried over the fire with the rest of the catch. The next day I caught a big one which I declared to be larger than Josie’s. Hers had already shrunk after being dried on the fire, so we argued about whose was the biggest for the rest of the trip.
There are 2 stories about feeding my crew in Central Africa that most people would find revolting. I took them out of this blog post. There are some things that those who did not live in the Congo Basin Rainforest can’t understand. It all seemed to have happened in a different lifetime. Life is pretty tame here in TN, but I still have 1 groundhog in the freezer. The grandkids have been asking when we will cook it up in the outdoor kitchen.
Adventures in Suburbia 