Stupid, Fat Hobbit...

One of my favorite parts of the Lord of the Rings movies is when Gollum and Sam argue about how rabbit (or, if you will coneys) should be eaten. Gollum can’t stand the idea of killing something and then taking the time to roast it over a fire and serve it up with some complimentary dishes (you know, POE-TAY-TOES?). Anyway, I always laugh at that scene and even now as I remember it. Well, I laughed again tonight at dinner as Andrea and I probably repeated Sam’s same terrible offense with the Gmz food called “una.”

 

You see, during our first day of learning Gmz, we were collecting new words when we came across a root vegetable called “una.” The Amharic translation (“boya”) didn’t help us as our Amharic-English dictionary had no such entry and just looking at the above ground vine left us clueless as to what we might call this veggie in English. “So,” we said, “when the “una” is ready to be dug up, we want to see it.” And sure enough, yesterday afternoon, Bizare (one of our language teachers) shows up at our door with two freshly exhumed “una.” We thanked him profusely and asked “how do we eat it?” “You just boil it in water for two hours and then eat it” was his response. And so, in the name of good anthropology, we decided that we would have ONLY boiled una for dinner that night. And so we did.

 

Turns out we still don’t know the English word for una but I can add “taro” to the list of foreign words it has collected. You see, I remember eating this same veggie in Papua New Guinea, where it was called “taro.” The English translation there was “sweet potato,” but it is nothing like the yams we think of back home. What did it taste like? Well…it was like a potato with a little more flavor and a little less starch. It wasn’t bad, but with the mind of Samwise, we looked at the leftover una and thought “we could do better.”

 

So the next night, we took our reheated una, added some cooked zucchini, some little steaks and smothered it all with peppered beef gravy. Had Bizare been there to see what we had done to his beautiful una, then maybe Gollum would have had a sympathizer – “Stupid, skinny foreigners…it ruins my precious una!”