A little on Food

One of the things I do with my time here is cook. I try to have dinner ready for my wife most nights when she returns from work. Sometimes we cook together. Fresh produce is very easily available in both the grocery stores and at the outdoor markets/kiosks. Things we usually pick up are eggplant, tomatoes (one variety- akin to roma), carrots, zucchini, butternut squash, green and red bell peppers, onion, garlic, ginger. Once we found broccoli at the grocery. And of course, kale (called sukuma wiki) grows in the garden. The produce must be used quickly after buying. Some days I just go to get veggies and look to see what looks good. Some days I pass and some days the produce looks great. We are enjoying the fruit. It is very tasty and most of the fruits are different than what can be had in MN. Or even if one can technically get a mango in MN, they taste very different (read: better) here. Or, it is such that the bananas here are not quite like the bananas in the States. We haven’t figured out when the “season” for ripe mangoes or avocados are, but we are waiting for patiently for this time. Other fruits one can get here include, pineapple, passion fruit, guava, small green on outside oranges, and papaya.

In cooking, I haven’t yet attempted any of the staples of traditonal Kenyan cuisine: ugali (made from corn meal and somewhere between the consistency of super thick cream of wheat and polenta), githeri (like red bean and corn stew), chapatti (fried flat bread). Instead I have been trying (with the help of an awesome cookbook loaned by friends) to learn more of the other readily available food style: Indian. There is a Kenyan community here who are ofIndian descent. The history of this is that during colonial times the English “brought over” many Indians to build the railroad from the coast to Kampala, Uganda. In the messy colonial history, Indians where favored over local Kenyans to make up what is referred to in the reading I’ve done as “the merchant class”. So there are Indian restaurants, a huge brand new Hindu temple, and what seems to be a tightknit and relatively rather affluent community. All that said, the ingredients are readily available in most stores. So far I have made eggplant/roasted pepper/cashew rice (See pictures below), a dahl (w/ kale standing in for spinach), a quick dish w tomatoes and chickpeas (see photo w mango below) and a squash(or recipe called for pumpkin) coconut curry. They turned out fairly well, I’d say. I look forward to cooking my way through the book.