Arsenal to Akwidaa and a question for you…

Follow

Hello and happy new year!

We made it back to drizzle-land, but only just.  As Matt had suspected,
being so early for the flight did in fact turn out to be too good to be
true, as we still managed to assume our usual position of last to check
in.  (Virgin Atlantic had the cheek to imply I hadn’t paid for my
ticket, which caused some trouble, especially as it turned out to be true.)

So, now we find ourselves both officially unemployed, which is somewhat
disconcerting, but also quite exciting as it gives us some time for an
extravagant culinary road trip – the result of a couple of drunken
conversations involving phrases like ‘you only live once’.  Imagine a
‘P’-ish-shaped route going around Europe, from the match day burger vans
near our house in Arsenal, via Polish babas, as far as Turkish meze,
back via Italian gnocchi, and then down past Moroccan tagines and
Burkinabe baguettes to Ghanaian fufu.  The goal is to reach our mates
Tom and Jo in Akwidaa, Ghana, in time for a Christmas rum punch on the
beach – a party to which you’re all invited.

Perhaps you can help?

If you can give us any contacts, tips or recommendations that would be
really, really appreciated.  Perhaps you or someone you know can
recommend beautiful places to stay, yummy foods to try, restaurants to
eat in or work in (I plan to ‘stage’ in a few places), cooking schools,
farms, vineyards, dairies etc to visit, mates with good local knowledge
and/or a spare bed….  We’ll be stopping everywhere along the ‘P’, but
focussing mainly on France, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Turkey, Greece,
Croatia, Italy, Spain, Morocco, Senegal, Mali and Ghana.  This sort of
thing.

In return I can offer more recipes, drawn from our intensive research
into the cuisines of the regions we visit.  They might not be so regular
in future I’m afraid.  For example, you might not get one during the
alarmingly long, very deserty and in places land-mined stretch through
Western Sahara and Mauritania.  (Don’t worry mum, apparently local armed
guides can lead you through the worst patches.)

If you can help, please call or email.  Recipes will resume shortly…