Cooking in the sticks with, yes, sticks

FLASH-BACK POST: January 5, 2010
[post written on Jan. 9, 2010]

After a few very-busy wildlife watching days in the Serengeti, we were ready for a little down time at our comfy and affordable Caanan Hotel in Arusha, Tanzania. While chatting with a friendly employee, we also found out that they run a tour company called Oreteti which prides itself on being a responsible travel company (fair wages to local employees and profits used to support community-development projects). We were intrigued by one of the day-long programs they offered - a Tanzanian cookery class. Now you should understand, we love to cook and for sometime had been feeling a certain longing for our kitchen back home, so we were already primed to be receptive to the idea of this class. Then while reading the description, it was mentioned that the secrets of Plantain stew and Chapati (some of the favorite foods we’d eaten to date) would be revealed to us, so we were sold and signed up for this adventure the following day. In talking to Heles, the tour company’s manager, we expected we’d just go to a kitchen somewhere in Arusha and prepare a feast, but it turned out to be so much more.

The day of our cooking class we went out into the parking area to find Heles, Joshua (the Canaan Hotel’s cook), and Samuel (taxi driver guy-extraordinaire) loading supplies and equipment into the trunk of Samuel’s Toyota Corolla. Apparently, we were off to Joshua and Samuel’s village for our day of culinary revelation!

We arrived at our kitchen in a village 40-minutes east of Arusha, on the slopes of Mt. Meru (little sister to infamous Kilimanjaro). Stepping out of the car we unsure of how we would proceed in this unfamiliar kitchen: there was no sink, no fridge, no stove. Just the courtyard of a church.

Making delicious grub with Joshua

After laying down banana leaves for a table, we got to work. Joshua had one of his fellow villagers bring us a supply of kerosene in a re-used, glass Coca-Cola bottle for the stove and Joshua himself ran off with a 5-gallon bucket to fetch water from the local stream. Under his tutelage, we began by making a millet porridge to sustain us through our afternoon of cooking. As Carissa stirred away at her cauldron muttering “boil, boil, toil…,” Rich was set up with a cutting board and some beef in the entranceway to the church. The cuts selected were more adventurous than what we would normally be putting into a stew and Rich learned that slicing up rumen and intestines is more difficult than you’d expect. He was relieved that there wasn’t any lung, though.

The beef, onions and tomato Rich chopped formed the base of a stew. Broad banana leaves laid on the ground formed the kitchen counter, and using one kerosene stove (sometimes in a cardboard box) and village-made charcoal under 3 hearthstones, we made some good grub. As a cuisine, this meal was simple, with salt and oil as the main flavor enhancers, but definitely delicious. Here’s what we made:

• 2 types of beef stew: one with lots of vegetables, another with plantains
• chapatti to accompany the stews (Carissa’s favorite)
• wheat porridge (wheat, water, milk, butter)
• coconut rice (Carissa shredded the coconut using a fancy coconut shredder, then mixed with water to make coconut milk. The rice was cooked over the charcoal using a plastic bag and banana tree bark as a lid to keep moisture in)
• Sautéed greens of some sort
• fresh fruit (including large pieces of avocado served like melon)

 Our church-courtyard kitchen

Rich, Carissa and Joshua enjoying an appetizer of porridge

Carissa shreddin' coconut (above) and the shredder (below)

Heles and Carissa cooking chapati

All in all it was a really fun day filled with lots of laughter and many really interesting conversations where we learned a lot about one another‘s background, family, and cultural practices. There were plenty of jokes too and Carissa’s efforts to form round chapatti became a running joke for Joshua and Heles for the rest of the afternoon (apparently Carissa‘s chapatti look more like Mt Meru than a circle). Most of the day we had an audience of village children staring at us through large holes in the churchyard wall where our kitchen and dining area was set up. We ended up preparing more food than the 4 of us could eat, but were only able to convince one brave child to help us eat the leftovers (at least until we left to walk around the village; when we returned there was nothing left!).

 Rich, Carissa, and Joshua enjoying the fruits of our labors

Any good meal should be followed by a little exercise to settle the tummy, so we took a walkabout through the village. The verdant landscape was radiant in the evening light with Mt Meru and Mt Kilimanjaro lurking in the distance. We passed by many sights: the river where village women were collecting water, large fields of maize, and small-scale farmers doing their work and watching us walk by, and several other very rustic churches in this community.