I am not a gastronomic tourist by any means - I'm a picky eater at the best of times, and not usually very adventurous with what I put in my mouth. But I'm trying to eat Kenyan cusine adverturously and it is paying off - not only am I pleasantly surprised by most Kenyan staples, I'm also a hit with the locals who find my love of githeri a shock and a delight. My host mother, who has hosted volunteers from all over the world, says her friends often ask her what she feeds the white people because it is a common belief here that white people are actually physically incapable of eating a Kenyan diet (I'm not sure what they think would happen, spontaneous combustion maybe?) So here, as best as I can describe, is a taste of Kenya.
The main staple you will read about in guidebooks is ugali and indeed it is eaten en mass by most people. It is simply maize flour, cooked usually over an open fire, to near brick consistency - literally, you could pick up a hunk of this stuff and do some pretty serious damage! Although the other volunteers have tried ugali and found it a somewhat terrifying experience, I have been quite enjoying it. Eating ugali is actually a refined art form - you eat it with your right hand, breaking off a piece, rolling it into a ball then flattening it and using it to scoop up whatever dish is complimenting it. Usually that is sukumawiki.
Sukumawiki is kale, usually prepared by steaming it with onions. The Swahili word sukumawiki literally means "to push the week." It is called such because it is cheap and plentiful and you can make lots at once then use it to push through the week. It however leads to great confusion for me when I'm delivering a baby and everybody is shouting "SUKUMA" and I'm saying "Sukuma? Wiki?"
Githeri, another staple is most popular among Kikuyus, which means I eat a lot of it. It is boiled maize and beans usually served with steamed cabbage or boiled potatoes. It is my typical lunch at the hospital canteen - I enjoy the taste but really I eat it because it cracks me up to watch people staring at me in complete amazement as I eat. Even the canteen staff giggle evertime I order githeri.
As I have mentioned before, chai is drank by the gallon here. It is often accompanied by a snack such as chapati, mandaazi (fried dough, kinda like a donut), boiled arrowroot or sweet potatoe. Dessert here is usally fresh fruit - which is amazing! We really don't have any understanding what fresh produce is in Canada (most of our produce has spent days on trucks by the time it reaches us). Pineapples, bananas, manoes, watermelon and pawpaw - the fruit here is just so good!
Finally the meat... it is actually eaten fairly infrequently, which suits my tastes just fine. Beef, pork and chicken are all readily available (hanging in the unrefrigerated window of the butcher shop, eyeballs and all), but the real speacialty is nyama choma, literally "cooked meat". You can buy it everywhere on the street, just random meat cooked on a little charcoal barbeque. It can technically be any animal, but it is usally goat, which I find to be rather chewy. I can't say I'm particularily a fan of barbequed goat, but I guess it's not so bad.
Last night I went with some of the other volunteers to Carnivore - rated one of the top 50 restaurants in the world by Lonely Planet. It is aimed of course at tourists and expats as the 2000 shilling (about $30 CAD) set price is our of reach of most Kenyans. The restaurant is, as the name suggests, a meatalicious extravaganza. You have a little white flag on your table and as long as the flag is up they will continue to bring you one kind of meat after another. There is also soup, salad and baked potatoes, but let's be honest, that is only for the weak. Oh the meat - chicken wings, chicken breast, pork ribs, beef steak, beef ribs, pork sasuage, lamb, osterich meatballs and crocodile - that's right, I ate osterich and crocodile! I'm pretty pleased with myself! All the meat is cooked over this massive grill at the center of the dinning room, the smell of charcoal wafting through the air. It was a fun night, and the ambiance of the place is fabulous, but I really don't think the human body was meant to ingest that much meat - at least mine wasn't, I'm still recovering!
1 comment:
Carnivore sounds similar to the churrascarias you find in Brazil. (Churrasco is the Portuguese word for barbecue; a churrascaria is a restaurant featuring barbecued meat.) The waiters bring the meat to your table on huge swords, going to each person individually and asking if they'd like some. The first time I went to one, after several waiters had gone by, I turned to my father (who'd been to these before) and asked him when they stopped coming around. Dad told me, "When you take a stick and beat 'em off."
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