So farmers plant corn during the rainy season to harvest and store it for the rest of the year. Whenever a household needs more flour, women bring some of the dried corn to a mill where it is ground down into flour.
The kapokia leaves, chotu seasoning and red palm oil are all food products that come from trees. Some trees are planted and grown on purpose by farmers, but many trees are found in “the bush,” or uncultivated land. If the tree is useful, people will notice where the tree is, and forage from it regularly. If some part of the bush is turned into farm land, certain trees will be protected. For example, the kapokia tree is very large, so most people would not plant one near their home. Instead, its leaves are foraged. Because people know the tree provides an important ingredient for sauce, people do not cut it down.
Chotu is made from seed pods of another tree. If a family would like to earn some extra money, they may harvest these seeds to turn them into chotu. If they don’t have this tree near their house, they often ask permission from their neighbors to walk through their property collecting the necessary seeds. Like the kapokia tree, this tree is protected but not cultivated.
Palm oil palms are planted intentionally, but they can also be found in the bush. My host family has many palm oil trees in their yard. When the palm nuts are ripe, they make some palm oil to use in their own cooking. There are also larger farms that purposefully grow lots of palm oil palms in order to make oil and sell it.
The other ingredients in the kapokia sauce are salt, dried fish, onions and bouillon cubes.
