Putting Carb Counting Skills to the Test with Delicacies from Ghana

When you’re a type 1 diabetic, or the mom of a 10-year old type 1 diabetic who really couldn’t care less at this point in her life (and, really, why should she have to?) you know that its all about the numbers game. Numbers swirl through your vision, day in and day out, and at night you dream of them. High numbers (bad), low numbers (badder) and numbers that are sheer perfection, though achieved only after herculean efforts.

Yes, we look at numbers incessantly. We hear someone blurt out a number, totally out of context, and we think “Ooops, that’s bad.” We see a food – a banana, a stick of gum, a bowl of fried rice and right away, we’re trying to guestimate carbs.

That’s the worst part, for me; the carb counting. Or in my case, the carb guessing. A nutrition scale is part of our arsenal, so it’s not all a hypothesis. We bought ourselves a Salter 1450, a nutrition scale par excellence, with all the bells and whistles and a few thousand foods on its vast data base. If we lived in the U.S., it would be ideal.

As we don’t live in the U.S., it’s a little less so. Alex has been living here in Ghana for as long as the rest of us, since early 2004. But in her case, that’s the majority of her life. She’s grown accustomed to local foods, and will often eat them in favor of my own homemade fixings. Alex would rather eat banku and pepper than mashed potatoes. She’d take a bowl of gari soakings over a bowl of oatmeal, any day. Give her a ball of kenkey and some one man thousand (incredibly tiny smoked fish), and she’s in heaven. Kelewele, abolo, red red, waakye, fried yam and shitor get first preference. 

Tilapia, banku and pepper

Dried gari and gari soakings

Fried yam with shito

Kelewele

Abolo

Ga kenkey and pepper

Waakye

Red red

 

Those things, tasty as they are (and mostly, they are) are NOT on the Salter database.  So Alex’s ingestion of any of them is more often than not a guess at what I think might be a fairly good substitute, nutrition wise. Kenkey is made from fermented corn dough, so polenta is a good substitute. Banku is also made from corn dough but often with pounded plantain or sometimes cocoyam, so polenta is as close as I can get. Gari is ground, dried cassava, so tapioca beads work as a good approximation. Plantains are the only “local” dish on the Salter scale, but I have to consider how it’s cooked, with minced ginger and pepper spice, and fried in a giant vat of oil.

Community 1 market

Local foods are not pre-packaged; they’re purchased from a stall at the local market, often wrapped in newspaper. Sizes and quantity often vary from one day, and one seller, to the next, so never can we assume that what “worked” yesterday will work today. Believe that, and you’re equally as likely to be chasing a high as you are fighting a low.

So, next time you want to complain about carb counting and crazy numbers, even after you've search your Salter, or checked your Calorie King, think of us here doing our best guestimating.