STRAWBERRY ROUNDED YAM

I breezed into one of the African stores in the suburbs of DC(District of Columbia)- USA. Grocery buying normally is meant to be cheap, that is when you are buying American groceries. But when you make the mistake of breezing into an African store, you would have to cough out blood to pay for items on the shelves. I have being a Nigerian all my life, a total switch to American dishes is just difficult for me to handle. I still manage Chinese, India and Thai food, but American dishes seems to send me to the latrine.(toilet).

The first thing i noticed in front of the store was a caption which says:

"There is no refund, exchanges may be permitted depending on Stores discretion"

That said , African stores are just different from other stores. Your six senses has to be alert to avoid been cheated. Here are my reasons
i. Bread, the agege bread(butter bread) on the shelves has no expiration dates. You have to look at it closely, to determine when the bread was made. After this, you have to smell the bread well. Otherwise, you would be buying a bread that is going bad.

ii. Yams, my favorite. You call it a million dollars and am still buying. I still don't know why? But Yams around here easily go bad. You would have to peel the top , the middle and the base to ascertain that non of its parts is rotten.

iii. I still dont get it. Same plantains you get in farmers market , is extremely expensive in African stores . Same product, same size but there is a big difference in price.

iv. You need to check the expiry dates on the sardines and geisha. They don't remove expired product from the shelves, so buyers are at their own risk.

After scouting around the store i came across the new item i have never seen before, POTATO FUFU. I was a little puzzled, so i decided to take a look at the label to see who the manufacturer was, "MAMA's CHOICE".
They have several variants of fufu flavors such as potato fufu , plantain fufu and cocoyam fufu.
The major difference i have noticed over the years when i compare food in Nigeria to America is variants. For example cereals, there are more than 50 different variants of cereal such as frosted wheat flakes , brad flakes , raisin bran, corn flakes , Mmm Granola, froot loops etc. One would actually get lost in an attempt to buy just regular cereal because regular depends on who is buying and location.
Growing up, it was either Golden Morn or Corn flakes, if you object to any of these two flavor, you are going to drink OGI(pap) to school. I have always wondered why we can't have Nigerian dishes in so many flavors.

Imagine strawberry pounded yam or we should call it strawberry rounded yam, Imagine Okasi in pineapple flavor , imagine OGI flavored in grape fruits or rhasberry flavor. Why some companies has not researched into that area , i just dont understand. I guess they are spending more resources on energy than research and development. Or may be they have really not thought about it.

Any way, while i wait for the reality of strawberry rounded yam, I am managing my "Potato Fufu" . And honestly the stuff taste cool.
Have a POTATO FILLED INDEPENDENCE DAY.