By JORDAN GREEN, Editor in Chief
Edwin Yemoh said he remembers watching his mother make jollof rice, fried chicken and coleslaw in their family’s home in Ghana when he was a child.
On Tuesday, it was his turn to cook.
“My mom has been cooking this ever since I was a kid,” he said. “It’s a unique thing.”
Yemoh, a senior computer science major from Accra, Ghana, cooked dishes popular in his home country for part of the Tuesday night dinner in the Coronado Café at Northwestern, where he is a student worker.
Rice, chicken and coleslaw are mainstays in his family’s home, he said. To cook jollof rice, Yemoh made a tomato paste and added rice to it. His coleslaw includes cream and vegetables.
Yemoh said his mother, Regina, taught him how to cook. He said he followed her recipes.
“I cooked everything from scratch, so it took almost four hours,” he said. “My mom would spend five hours, six hours in the kitchen just trying to cook dinner or lunch.”
After he finished cooking the food, he helped serve it to students passing through the food line in the cafeteria. He said he’d be sending photos of his work to his mother.
“She’s going to be so joyous,” he said. “She’s going to be so happy.”
Yemoh, who refers to himself as a “momma’s boy,” said he’s grateful his mother passed her culinary talents on to him.
“My passion is my mom,” he said. “Me and my brothers know how to cook.
We all cook, and we’re in a different country, but we’ll never go hungry because we already have the skills at our fingertips. … I look back at what she taught me, and I’m using those skills.
“I can use them anywhere I go in the world.”