Cooking in Tanzania

This past weekend was devoted to market shopping and cooking, and so I will post pictures of both. Another intern and I went to the market on Saturday and shopped around--I stocked my cabinets with fruits, veggies, beans, and corn flour for about $7. That is one thing that I'm going to miss the most when I'm back in the USA: cheap fruit and vegetables, year round. I'll also miss being able to buy odd numbers of things. It took me a while to get used to not buying things in bulk, but now I prefer it. I can buy three avocados (of varying ripeness--I have one that's hard as a rock in my cabinet right now, waiting to ripen at the end of the week for me to eat it) if I want, or just two; I can buy five eggs, and not worry about them going bad; and I can buy four bananas, or just three, and then when I run out just get more (because I buy them from my next door neighbor. "Welcome banana" is their unfailing greeting to me, even though I've tried to say hello, hi, mambo, and all manner of other things).

So, in the next few days I will be attempting exciting culinary delights: plantains, chapati, ugali, and beans (without a crock pot). Yesterday I cooked beans and plantains.

I don't actually know what kind of beans these are, but they're very gook cooked with salt and garlic. At the market there's a huge burlap bag filled with them, probably as tall as my waist, and the shop owner scooped up a bunch, weighed them, and put them in a plastic bag for me. I soaked them for 12+ hours--which I think is the secret--and it only took about four hours on the burner for them to be nice and soft. (By the way, when I say "burner," I mean "burner," singular. What you see is what I have to cook with by way of a stove. I'm actually quite impressed that beans on a gas burner, in a thin aluminum bowl, with a glass plate as a lid, came out so well.)

I've never had much luck with beans before. When I cooked them on the stove it looked like a bean massacre because the pot boiled over (and I mean massacre: it was all over the stove, somehow all over the walls, on the floor, dripping down the oven), and when I cooked them in the crock pot they came out crunchy. These beans are the softest, best tasting beans I've ever made, and I am so happy to eat them at lunch (and dinner, and lunch again, and dinner...) For lunch today I had them with rice (which I have yet to master) and avocado. Yum! Good for my digestion, probably not so good for my office mates.

The plantains were a bit more of an experience. They're super good fried or boiled and I like them more than potatoes. I first had them on the coffee farm tour and they weren't cut up at all, but were fried whole. So I figured I would just peel them and pop them into the pan, and all would be good. First, you don't "just peel" a plantain--this I figured out by the time I got to the second one. I wouldn't say the first one put up a fight, but I would say we struggled for a bit (it lost). Second, frying them didn't quite turn out like I thought. I've fried a number of things before, but I put too much oil in the pan and so they were practically deep-fried. Not bad, because the vegetable oil here really tastes good (and has no cholesterol) but I think I'll try boiling them next time.

This bar of soap has changed my life. "Sunlight" yellow and smelling so pleasantly of lemon, it has freed me from the bonds of waiting for laundry. There are no washing machines in Arusha--not one. All clothes are washed by hand. My landlady's mother has a maid who does her clothes, and so she told me that I can just throw mine in with hers. This is a very nice arrangement, as you can imagine, but the clothes take about 4 days to wash, dry, and the iron (I really like wearing ironed t-shirts. Call me crazy.) But now, with this lovely bar of soap, I can wash all manner of small things and have them dry by the next day. And I even iron them. Apparently this is miracle soap, too: the label said "for laundry, kitchen, and personal use." Just add water, and the whole house will be clean before you know it.

Lastly, this is the small lizard that was hanging out in the corner of my room for a night. I think he's outside somewhere now. He looks like a gecko (based on the foot and coloring) and he was probably no more than two inches long, tail and all. I wished him a happy life and told him to keep eating all of those mosquitoes.