This is for Adam

It's all about food.

A few of you have asked what the food is like. What is Liberian food? From my experience so far, it's mainly a lot of rice, cassava, soups and stews. And bush meat.

What is bush meat? Basically whatever they capture in the bush. If you're lucky, it's dik dik (a kind of antelope) or monkey, and if you're not so lucky, it's giant rats or other such things. It's usually served in a soup (so you can't always tell what it is...), and mostly found in the country-side. I haven't had it in the city though I'm not really looking for it...

Otherwise, there's rice. Lots and lots of it. In fact, the vast majority of their rice is imported, though they do grow rice here. There's also lots of cassava, in a variety of forms, with fantastic names: fufu (a doughy mound of pounded cassava, usually served with soup); doughboy (a slightly coarser mound of cassava - though really I'm not sure if I can taste the difference); acheke (grated cassava such that it kind of looks like rice); bong fries (yes, cassava fries!).

Quite a few of the meals consist of some type of stew/soup with meat (usually a variety of different types) served with rice or cassava. Some of the dishes on the menu that I've tried:

Palm butter - a reddish-yellow stew/sauce made from palm nuts
Jollof rice & fried chicken (pictured above)
Palava sauce (it's a slimey vegetable, as it was described to me when I ordered it; and it is)
Collard greens
Cassava leaf
Potato greens
Fried plantains, fried fish
Goat soup

The fish is great here, though you usually see these tiny over-cooked fish sold on the side of the streets. Shrimps are great too. Have to check out how to buy fresh seafood. I did have sushi here the other night; it served the need but wasn't as good as I'd hoped.

Fresh vegetables, sadly, are not so common. It's fairly easy to find bananas and pineapples - I have to find the mangoes! I'm told it's the beginning of mango season...

There are also quite a few Lebanese restaurants here. So you can get your fill of humous, fatouch and tabouleh salads and shwarmas. And of course they have Chinese food here (there always seems to be a Chinese restaurant in every city) - and I've checked out one restaurant. It was actually okay; there are quite a few Chinese people living here. From what I heard, they have their own garden where they grow their own vegetables. Otherwise, most everything is imported. So much of the food is imported here - apparently even the eggs are imported from India!