I love food and I love to cook. There’s something special about taking the time to plan out a homecooked meal, executing it perfectly and enjoying a delicious plate of food. It’s even better if I can go to the local farmers market and purchase the meats or vegetable directly from the person who raised the animals or grew the vegetables. Of course, in an ideal situation, I would be able to contribute to my cooking with vegetable or spices that I grew myself. Sadly, that will have to wait. For now, I make do with what I can find at the grocery store, always sticking to the way my mom shops by looking for the products that are raised or grown fairly and naturally.

If I don’t want to make food for myself, a wide array of restaurant options are at my fingertips. I can get cuisine styles from any corner of the world in minutes or if I’m feeling special, at a white tablecloth restaurant. The variety of options means I don’t have to eat the same style of food more than once if I don’t want to. I could get sushi or a burrito or a sushi burrito if I wanted.

Getting a quick meal in Accra means stopping at a chop bar on the side of the road and eating the specialty that the owners have recently cooked up. There could be fufu, jollof, red red, plantains, hardboiled eggs or waakye, to name a few. The options are a lot of the same but unique because of who takes the time to cook it. The serving sizes are anything but small and I struggle to finish a bowl piled high with waakye and stew while Ghanaians tend to eat it all with ease. The food is delicious and filling, but I struggle to find something unique each time we go out for a meal.

At work I eat some combination of rice, beans, vegetable stew, chicken and hard-boiled eggs on most days. There is fufu and goat stew, but I’ve reached a point where I don’t think my stomach can handle anything remotely interesting. I would love to continue to try the local cuisine but the fear of getting sick again drives me away. I really just need to eat bowls of leafy greens for the next month to make up for my hard diet of rice, beans and chicken.

As dense as some of the food is here, I appreciate having the opportunity to try another countries cuisine in the area where it is cooked. Being local means I am able to eat mangoes and pineapples that are fresh. Just by walking out of the Aya center I can purchase ripe mangoes that are sweeter, juicer and less expensive than in the U.S. While commuting to work, hawkers offer foods like doughnuts, groundnuts, Fan Ice, ripe cut mangoes, meat pastries and more. While driving through neighboring villages, bush meat and bats are sold in on the sides of the road. Overall, if you are willing to take the risk of not knowing exactly where the food came from or how it was prepared, there is an abundance of options that will satisfy an array of cravings.

Towards the end of the trip, I’ve realized that there are some foods I wish I had the stomach to try. If I could go back in time I like to think I’d be bold and try tilapia from the Volta Region or goat light soup and banku from the canteen at work. At the same time, I’ve had my fill of Ghanaian food and I look forward to the opportunity to cook skirt steak, mashed potatoes soaked with butter and steamed broccoli for myself.