First the beer
Cut the chicken
Fetch the spices (Note: There is no such thing as overspicing)
Soak your plantain in blended tomatoes and rodo overnight
Top up your beer as you suddenly realize you can’t abandon this shit halfway
The most important part of cooking is keeping the cook lubricated – Chris Bankole
Season chicken
Don’t worry about getting your fingers dirty
Gist about setting up a Mexican Restaurant in Ibadan
Laugh at the fact that you don’t know how to cook Mexican food
Gist about a crooked vegetable delivery man called Ahmeed
Fry chicken
There is such a thing as too much oil!
I used to know a cook, fantastic guy, nasty when sober, nice when drunk – Chris
Chop tomatoes, rodo, onions
Blend
Let the chicken simmer
drink some more beer
start to clean up
Discuss – Where do jobless alcoholics get money to buy alcohol and other existential questions
Fry the pepe
Add one cube of knorr and a teaspoonful of salt
Leave spoon inside the pot
Parboil rice (shit I forgot the picture!)
Drink some more beer
Touch spoon which is hellishly hot
Scream
Drink some more beer
Start clearing the kitchen
Realize this shit is no joke
drink some more beer
Discuss painting houses, past, present, future
Would you describe the labour you put into painting a house as intense as the one you put into cooking a pot of jollof rice?
Realize you’ve been staring at your empty cup, horror!
How do Cooks do it?
How do women who work nine to five, come home and do this?
Remember you’re not even in your own cramped up, nepaless kitchen
Remember how useful kitchen gadgets are, how marvelous running water, electricity and a huge zinc are
Start frying dodo
Realize you’ve been at this for over one hour
Swear like a sailor
Throw rice in the pepe
Discuss Death – everybody dies
Discuss A woman’s place is in the kitchen
Seriously?
Discuss spending two hours in the kitchen to prepare food for five people
Promise death to the next person who says ‘housewives’ do nothing all day
Come closer and tell me how a woman should do all the cooking…
- Ayodele Olofintuade
9jafeminista 