So I remember the first time my mom asked to cook for my brothers while she was away. This is really embarrassing…gosh. It was my very first time cooking that particular food with no supervision, but my mom had a theory about me when we were kids. According to her, if my memory was so good at remembering things I saw, then it meant I could cook that food perfectly because I’ve seen her do it countless times.
She wasn’t wrong. I knew exactly how to start, what to do, and how to do it, but there was just one problem: how to know the food was ready. So when I was a kid, I had issues differentiating between uncooked foods and cooked foods. It was worse with beef. I know it’s disgusting but I could eat raw beef like it was cooked beef. It was hard for me to know when beef is done.
I just realized I haven’t mentioned the food I was asked to make. It was banku. Banku is basically corn dough mixed with cassava dough that has been cooked and molded. More like corn dough cake.
So it was after school. I was in primary four if I remember correctly. It can be made on a stove or coalpot, but since it was my first time, I used the latter. I started by mixing my corn and cassava dough with water. I added salt and then put it on the fire.
I remember one of my friends seeing me and laughing because he couldn’t believe I could even cook in the first place. Well, can you blame him? I couldn’t believe myself either. I started around 1pm, and I kept stirring the mixture.
I stirred till it started hardening, and I began adding a little amount of water to make it softer while making sure the fire in the coalpot was hot enough. Oh yes, I told you I knew how to do it. I kept repeating the process over and over again, and then I realized that was all that I knew about preparing banku.
My friend came back from where he was going at 6pm to meet me still behind the coalpot. He couldn’t help but laugh so much that I just had to join in. Although he himself didn’t know how to cook banku, he was the one who told me the food was ready and I could dish it out.
I had no option but to listen to him because, as I said earlier, I had a problem telling if food was well cooked. I dished it out and later served my brothers, who came home late and tired from wherever they went. Up till today, I don’t know if that food was cooked or not, and I must say I was happy my brothers were so hungry they couldn’t even tell if the food was nice or not. So was my first food well done? I guess we’ll never know.
Images are mine