Food Addendum

As one of the emails I received said, you can learn so much about a culture through its food. When I wrote my first food post, I had only been here about a week, and I now have even more food experiences.

I was lucky enough to have the quintessential culinary experience- I helped Sister Mary, who is not a Kenya native but I would consider her to be an expert on Kenyan culture, cook a traditional squash dish for dinner. There was no recipe, there were no measurements, there was just food. We cooked squash and bananas (not yellow yet, green bananas are not sweet and are eaten here like potatoes) in a fry pan. In a pot, we boiled cabbage, added onions, tomatoes, and apples, and then eventually the squash and bananas. After letting it simmer for maybe 30 minutes, it was an amazing vegetable stew. Roommates, get ready: I will be making this for dinner on more than one occasion. It’s easy and delicious, and like almost all the other food I’ve eaten here, very healthy.

That night, the sisters invited us over for dinner, which was so nice! They invited us for 6:30 around 4:30, and the two American girls that we are, we were panicked to get something together to bring with us. Do we have time to bake? No, and even if we did, we don’t have a recipe. From my experience in the Storey kitchen, I know how essential recipes are in baking- and though I have made chocolate chip cookies from scratch a million times, I have no memory of the recipe. Not that there were any chocolate chips in the house.

So, in typical Kenya fashion, we resorted to whatever we had in the house- in this case, pineapple. We sliced a fresh pineapple and put it on a platter and marched on over to the convent for dinner. It was a really fun night- the friars are absolutely wonderful, don’t get me wrong, but it was nice to be eating with other women! The whole time we’ve been here, we’ve been the only women in the house, and having gone to an all-girls school, it was so nice to share in that meal with the sisters. It’s going to be a weekly affair, and if we continue to do it on Mondays, the next one will be on my birthday! A wonderful way to celebrate being 20 I think, especially since we’re having pancakes from mix that Sister Mary brought from the US- with syrup :).

As I said before, I do like the food here. It’s different from home, and I am starting to get a little homesick in terms of food. I craved a hamburger the other day- I don’t even usually eat red meat. Patricia and I stopped at Tusky’s (your friendly neighborhood supermarket) for the first time the other day while running errands with Sister Mary, and we each bought some chocolate- Cadbury has never tasted so good! I was also delighted to see my favorite Kinder Bueno bar in the store- the wrapper had writing in Arabic on it, which was cool. I still have the one that I bought in Switzerland, but I will be stocking up before coming home, don’t worry, NDA girls.

We’re also pretty sure that they don’t do brownies or cake from a box in Kenya- we are afraid to ask because we think they’ll laugh at us, but we wanted to bake for the friars and sisters- now that we have internet though, we have better access to recipes, so we’ll probably go the from-scratch route, assuming there are enough ingredients in the house. No sign of chocolate chips either… hmm. Bueno-chip cookies? It’s a possibility. I also have a feeling that using the oven will be an adventure in ad of itself, but I’ll be sure to update once I know for sure.