Beautiful Benin

After the slavery and voodoo, I was looking for some of the beauties of Benin. I didn't have to look far. here is one very cool pic from Google images:

I never think of Africa as having lush anything, but part of Benin is on the coast. I lifted the following paragraph and picture off of a tourist website.

                                           
                                            Lake Nakoue

If you’re heading to West Africa to unearth lost treasure, look no further than Benin. This club-shaped country, on the western edge of Nigeria, was once one of the most powerful empires in Africa– the Dahomey kingdom. The ruins of the Dahomeyans’ palaces and temples can be seen in Abomey, while Ouidah is a poignant reminder of where their riches came from: the slave trade. The Route d’Esclaves in Ouidah was the last walk on African soil for slaves bound for Brazil and the Caribbean. Museums here and in Porto Novo, Benin’s lagoon-side capital, examine the resultant Afro-Brazilian society and culture. Cotonou, on the other hand, is urban Africa at its most frazzling and polluted - but is not without its own charms, a lively nightlife and good shopping being a couple of them.

Benin dinner

Poor Benin.  It's not their fault that my cooking didn't work out on Friday, but it didn't.  It seems appropriate that this country with the poor history also had the poorest dinner to celebrate.  The appetizer was the real disaster--Akkra Fun Fun. Blech. Not FUN.  It sounded ok--you cook white beans then mash them up add some onions and a little cayenne pepper and deep fry. It was the deep frying that didn't work--after a few minutes the bean patties broke apart and then dissolved completely. We had a big pan of white bean oil that we thew out. We took the remaining bean mush and fried it up with just a little bit of oil and that seemed to work better and was actually quite tasty.  Also tasty was the "hot sauce" pretty much just onions and tomato paste with habanero pepper. Very nice flavor--I put it, as called for, in the crab cakes. The cakes were made in ramekins with lump crab meat, celery, breadcrumbs and scallions--sounds good enough and they were ok, but just ok. As a side dish there was okra with tomatoes and habanero--again ok. Dessert was lemon flan--but since I didn't have a double boiler--I got creative and made one out of our electric frying pan--I put one pie plate upside down in the fryer and then another pie plate with the flan in it on top of that--but water in the bottom of the frying pan and the lid on top to steam the flan. It took forever because I had no idea how to tell if it was done or not. We ate it the next day--the taste was ok, but somehow the texture was just really wet--it felt as if it held more water than it actually held. We each ate a piece and threw the rest out. 

Ah well---like real traveling--sometimes you're just glad to be back home with familiar food.