Bananas and Peanut Butter

When I was growing up I hated peanuts, especially peanut butter. In fact the smell of peanut butter made me gag. I think part of this was do to the fact that my best friend was allergic to peanuts, but that is neither here nor there...

Another thing I couldn't stand as a child was bananas. I just didn't like them. My brothers would eat them all the time, but not me. There were two exceptions to my disdain for bananas though, I would eat them sliced up in a bowl of Rice Krispies and milk, and I would eat them with peanut butter. I know that doesn't make any sense. I didn't like bananas and I didn't like peanut butter, but when you mixed the two together you had a delicious treat! Don't worry, my little brother noticed this discrepancy too and called me out on it as often as he could.

I'm still far from all grown up, but my tastes have definitely changed. I'm still not the hugest fan of plain bananas, but peanut butter, I love peanut butter, especially on bananas!!! Now when I say peanut butter, I'm not just any peanut butter, I'm talking about good peanut butter, no sugar, no salt, just ground roasted peanuts!! YUM!

Peanuts make up a significant part of Senegal's agricultural production. "Cultivated in the Groundnut Basin region, this cash crop provides 75% of the national agricultural production and employs 50% of the population." (2001)

I was introduced to Senegalese peanuts almost immediately upon arriving in country. While living in my training village, they were a much welcomed snack as well as a source of protein. Every day while we sat under the neem tree in front of my house struggling to learn Wolof, one of the women in the neighborhood would stop by on her way to the market and sell us roasted peanuts. And while at the training center in Thiès, I satisfied my cravings by buying peanuts from an old woman who comes to the center almost everyday to sell trainees and volunteers fresh out of the pan, still warm to the touch, perfectly salted, Senegalese grown, roasted peanuts. Delicious!

Now it just so happens that for one reason or another, I ended up in the beautiful town of Kaffrine, which just so happens to be located at the heart of Senegal's "Peanut Basin".

I arrived in Kaffrine at the end of October, the middle of peanut harvest. Everyday I watched several of the women and young girls that live in my courtyard headed out to the fields. They would come back right before lunch with large bundles of peanut plants on their heads. Then after lunch they would sit under the neem tree next to my house and pull the peanuts off the plants. They then set the peanuts out in the hot African sun to dry for a day before they shelled them. And boy oh boy can those women shell!!! With one in each hand they shell them, left, right, left, right. One after another until all that is left is a pile of debris.

Once the peanuts are shelled, the women winnow their piles of debris to separate the shells from the nuts. I really like this part of the process. The women are quite skilled at it, possibly because they've be doing it since they could walk. And if they happen to use a metal bowl for this process, which they usually do, it makes a quite a racket, a good one though, kind of like the sound of a t-post driver pounding in fence posts in the distance.

It took quite a lot to convince my family that I wouldn't die from the the long walk, the hard work, the dust and the heat, if I went out to the peanut fields. But after a week or so of constantly pestering them about it, they let me go. And yes it was hot and dusty and far away and bending over to pick up plants is tedious work especially when you do it day after day after day for months on end, but I'm a farmer, right!?!

My family doesn't actually own any land, but farmers hire women from the surrounding area to help with the harvest in exchange for peanuts. That's right, they work for peanuts. The farmer plows up the peanuts and then women pick up the plants and put them in piles to dry. Once they are dry, the small piles are collected into bigger piles and the peanuts are separated from the plants my hitting the piles with large sticks.

So I spent the morning picking up peanut plants and putting them in a piles. At the end of the morning each of us got a bundle of peanuts in exchange for our labor. Luckily it just so happen that a horse drawn cart was headed our way, so we loaded up our bundles of peanuts. There wasn't enough room for us on the cart though...

So what do you do when you have a bundle of peanuts, you make peanut butter! With the help of many different people, namely the young teenage girls in my compound, I started the process. First we picked the peanuts of the plants and set them out to dry. Then we shelled them, winnowed them and set them out to dry again. After a day out in the sun they were ready to roast!

Now peanuts roasted for peanut butter are actually processed differently than the roasted, salted peanuts that you buy on the side of the road and at the market. Those peanuts are boiled in salt water before they are roasted, but since I wanted peanut butter, we skipped that step. The roasting itself is a pretty simple process. There is a special pan used for roasting peanuts. You take the pan and sift a few inches of sand into it and set it on the fire. (Dirty sand leads to funky tasting peanuts.) When the sand is heated up, you add the peanuts and stir. Since you have to continually stir for ten or fifteen minutes, you usually roast peanuts with a friend so that you can take a break from stirring every now and again. And at the point when both of you are tired of stirring, you sift out the sand and voila, delicious roasted the peanut!!

Now if you are going to make peanut butter with these peanuts there are still a few steps left. After the peanuts cool, you have to take the thin papery coating off of them.. This is done by rolling the peanuts around in you hands. When that is done, you winnow the peanuts more time. The papery layer is so light that if you just pour the peanuts from one bowl to another from the height of a few feet, it all just blows away. And then you are ready to grind the peanuts!!

It just so happens that on the corner of my street, just two houses down is a boutique that has a machine that grinds peanuts into peanut butter. So a few of the young girls in my court yard accompanied me to the corner and I got my peanuts ground into peanut butter, the most delicious peanut butter ever!!! And the cost of the whole process: a morning out in the peanut fields, several afternoons of picking peanuts of plants and shelling, a dollar worth of fire wood, an afternoon of roasting and about ten cents to use the peanut butter grinding machine.

Now that I had this peanut butter, my "mother" asked me what I was going to do with it. Senegalese you peanut butter to make mafé. I just wanted it to put on bananas. When I told her this, she exclaimed, "That is bad. You shouldn't do that!!" = ) I tried to explain to her that in America that is one of the ways that we eat peanut butter. She decided it was okay, but was still pretty skeptical. Well, I bought a bunch of bananas and cut them into slices, put a little dab of peanut butter on each slice and gave them to all the people in my court yard. They all said they liked it, but I think a lot of them just said it to be nice, because I saw several people spit it out when they thought I wasn't looking. Oh Senegal...

So I've become addicted to bananas and peanut butter. I go through a kilo of bananas (2.2 lbs) every three or four days. Fortunately bananas are one of the main fruit crops here in Senegal, so in Kaffrine a kilo sells for 400 CFA, which is approximately 80¢. Sometimes I have three or four bananas with peanut butter a day... I think banana season ends in the not to distant future, but that's okay, because as it winds down, mango season begins!!