What Have We Always Said Is the Most Important Thing?

Breakfast at Mazzoldi House offers generally predictable fare.  Bread, porridge, tea, maybe some hard-boiled eggs, occasionally some mandazi (best described as East African donut holes).  I tend to keep it simple (toast with butter and a mug of steaming hot water).  But this morning I noticed a new addition to the spread.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Kabalagala!

My first guess was that they were some kind of potato pancake, but Fr. Freddy and Fr. Mawa quickly corrected me.  Kabalagala is made from bananas and cassava flour.  They are simply delicious!  These were not served hot, but the outside was still reasonably crispy, and the flavor was surprisingly (though I probably should have called it) sweet and banana-y.  I have learned to be cautious when an African is telling me that something is very sweet (a word used to describe both fish eyes and the dreaded Dorian).  Call me jaded.  But these really were delightful!

I popped back into the kitchen to give my compliments to the chef, a young man named Thomas.  He told me that Fr. Mawa was the one who showed him how to make Kabalagala, since it comes from his home place in Uganda.  This is kind of the neat thing about dining at Mazzoldi House.  Even though it is in Kenya, the priests who live here are from all over East Africa, and they each bring their recipes from home to be incorporated into the menu.  You really get a sense of the variety of the tastes and flavors of this part of the world. 

Unfortunately, Thomas couldn't give me a more specific recipe than "You mash up sweet bananas and add some cassava flour and you cook them."  Looks like I'll have to keep coming back for more!

Also, "Kabalagala" is one of the most fun words to say ever!

To Waste or Waste Not

As I prepare to welcome the C&S7 (even shorter now), I am feeling very conscious of the fact that I will be the "expert" on the scene.  I am pretty comfortable with the role.  I mean, I've spent months here over the years, and I've been very inquisitive during those visits, in anticipation of being able to gently guide newcomers through this chaotic world.  I can fill out customs forms in my sleep.  I don't even flinch when a matatu is driving directly at me on the wrong side of the road.  I know the names of all the foods.  I don't get excited when I see Maasai herders driving their goats through town.*

I can handle myself.

Which means it's time for an ego check.  I got one at dinner this evening.  I was raised in a house where you don't get down from the dinner table until your plate is empty.  "Make it zero!" is a common expression at the family table.  And I have carried that with me to this day (occasionally at my waistline's expense).  It grates on me to leave food on my plate.  It seems wasteful, and I don't want to be a wasteful person.  I make an effort not to take more than I want (or more than I should have), and I almost always lick my plate clean.

I did this tonight (because the food here is flipping delicious!), crossed my fork and knife on my plate, and leaned back in my chair.  "You know, Jo, in Africa, when you eat everything on your plate, it means that you didn't get enough to eat," said my friend Fr. Felix.  I apologized and explained that it is difficult for me to stop eating delicious things, so I just keep eating until they're gone.  "But Jo," he countered, "you are in Africa, and it is our custom to always leave something on your plate if you are satisfied."  Well, I certainly am not one to flout the culture of a place I am visiting, and I am an eager student.  But still... it's so wasteful!  "Jo, nothing here is wasted.  Don't you care if the pigs get anything to eat?  If you eat all of your food, what are the pigs going to eat?"  Fair point, Fr. Felix.

I went up and got just a little bit more food in order to not finish it.  I am so African.

*Just kidding- that is totally always exciting, 100% of the time.

The Dorian

In my travels, I pride myself on being an adventurous eater, “foodventurous” as I like to call it.  True, my will has been tested from time to time.  There are certain foods that I just don’t like: coconut, anise, olives, fermented millet porridge.  My feelings about chicken gizzards are well documented.  I was nearly undone when I foolishly let Dave order lunch for us in Westvleteren, Belgium and was forced, for the sake of pride, to eat what can only be described as chunky chicken Jell-O.  But nothing, my friends, not one thing could have prepared me for the unholy, gag-inducing terror of… 

The Dorian.

The Dorian is a fruit that, as far as my hosts or I know, grows exclusively on Zanzibar.  It has some similarities to Jackfruit, with its green spiky skin and large seeds, but though it is not anywhere near as large as the mighty Jackfruit, its skin is much spikier and its seeds are much larger.  Its rind is actually so spiky that it is impossible to hold the fruit by anything but the stem.  I feel that humanity should have gotten the hint that this was a fruit not intended for consumption.  The unblemished fruit gives off a vaguely sickening odor, yet another helpful hint for humanity to leave this fruit alone.  When you cut into it, the odor builds to a pungent scream of noxious fumes: DO NOT EAT THIS FRUIT!  The fruit’s flesh is amorphous white slimy pulp, clinging half-heartedly to seeds roughly the size of walnuts.  The overall effect reminded me of monkey’s brains, which are popular in Cantonese cuisine.

Was it intended to be a treat? A joke? A prank gone awry, played on me by the kindly sisters with whom I was staying?  I just don’t know, nor do I expect to.  I can say with all certainty that there was no malicious intent when they placed a plate of the reeking fruit in front of me.  I wish I could accurately describe the toxic smell.  The closest comparison I can come up with is a combination of sweat and gasoline.  I was cajoled into taking an infinitesimal taste by choruses of, “It’s sweet!  It smells bad, but the taste is sweet!”  They weren’t completely wrong- it tasted like sweat and gasoline with a hint of off-brand artificial sweetener.  Sr. Eunice told me it is good medicine for the stomach.  I can see the benefit if, say, someone took a goodly amount of poison and you didn’t have any activated charcoal around.  Personally, I don’t think I could hold a good dollop down. 

Eating cottage cheese was heaven compared to this heinous experience.

When I asked the sisters if they make all of their visitors try Dorian, then informed me that it is seasonal, so it isn’t available for visitors to try during most of the year.  When we parted ways, I assured them of my eventual return, promising to come in the Dorian’s off-season.

Epilogue

When I took the boat to Zanzibar on Monday, I thought it was cute and kind of funny that they handed out sick bags to all of the passengers for the 2 hour ride.  When I boarded the return shuttle, one quick sniff told me someone was taking a Dorian to the mainland.  I clutched my bag the entire way home and focused on breathing through my mouth.

Burying the Hatchet

Coconut and I have been at odds for as long as I can remember.  With the notable exception of coconut milk in Thai curry, I have loathed every food I have ever tried that has even the smallest traces of coconut.  “You can’t even taste it!” “It doesn’t even taste like coconut!”  Oh, how I detest those wheedling phrases, but I always relent.  I always give it a try.  Coconut shrimp, Caramel Delite/Samoa Girl Scout Cookies, Piña Coladas, Mounds candy, coconut rum… no, thank you.  Part of it is a texture thing- I can tell instantly if a cookie has coconut in it- and part of it is good old fashioned flavor.  I admit that I occasionally tell people that I am allergic in order to justify not eating proffered coconut treats. (Remember that episode of Wishbone when Sam had that awful reaction to the granola bar with coconut in it?  I was crazy jealous.)

So, naturally, when I was offered “coconut juice” on my first day in Zanzinbar, I politely but fervently declined.  “But Jo, it doesn’t even taste like coconut!”  *sigh*  So I relented to my sweetly insistent guides, and the driver pulled over to the side of the road.  He got out and came back a few minutes later with a large green coconut whose top had been whittled down and with a hole in the top.  He handed it to me and told me simply to drink.  When I looked inside, all I could see was clear liquid, and it didn’t smell anything like coconut, so I figured, what the hey?  I drank deeply from the awkwardly large seed, and it tasted magnificent!  Which is to say, NOTHING like coconut!  From my experience, I would say it tasted like very slightly sweetened water.  Had the coconut stayed on the tree for another 6 weeks or so, all of that water would have been absorbed making the hard coconut flesh that torments me so, but when it is still young enough, the “juice” is a delightfully refreshing treat. 

I feel that this is a big moment in my life, philosophically speaking.  If I can find a way, after all of these years, to enjoy raw coconut, then surely there must be a way to world peace!  But, you know, a way that doesn’t involve cutting down a growing thing in the flower of its youth to drink its life source.  That seems a little extreme in any other situation.

The Spice of Life

One of the things that I have always enjoyed about Africa is that they grow the kinds of things that America needs to have imported from faraway lands.  Bananas grow in the back yard.   Mango trees frequently dot the landscape.  Fresh, locally grown passion fruit and papayas are in fruit bowls on dining room tables.  I have eaten a lot of fruit, and I haven’t seen a single plu# sticker.

Zanzibar really kicked it up a notch. 

On my only full day on the island, my new friend Sr. Eunice and I started with a tour of a spice farm.  When you have been handling the red-capped McCormick spices almost exclusively your entire life, it is really mind-bending to see the spices in their raw, natural, living forms.  Our guide, Sisso, invited us to smell the alluringly sweet aroma of the ripening vanilla bean hanging from the vine.  He whittled a sliver of bark away from the cinnamon tree, bragging about the superior spicy quality of Zanzibar cinnamon, and handed it to me to chew. Better than all the Hot Tamales in the world!  Then, he used his knife to dig up a small bit of cinnamon tree root, and it amazingly smelled exactly like Vicks vapo-rub!  How could two such distinct flavors come from the same plant?  Cardamon, ginger, lemon grass, turmeric, cloves- each smelled more amazing than the last!  Sisso explained how the color of the pepper (white, green, or black), depended on when the peppercorn was harvested. We saw Henna, used for the elaborate painted skin decorations we saw on the arms of the Muslim women around town.  And the fruit!  We tried pickle fruit, shaped like a jalepeno, sour like a lime; star fruit, just shy of it’s true sweet ripeness, saw a young pineapple just starting to make it’s way in the world, and ate lichi by the dozens.  When lichi are ripe, they turn bright red, their spiky flesh making them about the size of a kiwi fruit.  Sisso would remove the rind so that I could eat the fruit, which looked and tasted for all the world like a peeled grape. 

A young man followed the tour at a distance, barefoot and wearing a trucker hat that read “Sex is not a crime.”  He hung back, weaving palm leaves together, and appearing magically at Sisso’s elbow whenever a tree needed to be climbed to retrieve out-of-reach fruit.  Towards the end of the tour, he twisted a rough looking rope around his feet, and scrambled straight up a towering palm tree to cut down a couple of coconuts.  There was something kind of aboriginal in the way that he climbed so easily, which made it all the more jarring when he answered his cell phone midway down the tree. Sisso led Sr. Eunice and I to a bench where we sat and sampled more local fruit- tangerines and custard apples (tasted exactly like apple Laffy Taffy- new favorite fruit!).   We capped off our taste adventure with samples of lemon grass and masala teas.  We dallied at the table of spices for sale for a while, but eventually had to tear ourselves away from the aromas and bid farewell to the spice farm.

This Porridge is Juuuuust Right

I may have mentioned in the past my aversion to the fermented-millet porridge that is served here every morning. In all of my foodventures here in Africa, it is the only food that I have tried and have decided never to eat again.* However, as much as I don’t ever ever ever want to eat it, I really enjoy observing how different people eat theirs. Some add sugar, some add milk, some eat it plain. But no one can compete with how Fr. Joseph eats his.

Most mornings at Mazzoldi I sit across from Fr. Joseph during breakfast, and he follows a very meticulous routine when preparing his morning porridge:

1. He fills his bowl about three quarters of the way with porridge.
2. Then he fills it almost to the brim with milk.
3. Next, he takes a large spoonful of butter and very slowly stirs it into the porridge and milk until the entire mixture is evenly blended.
4. Next, he dumps in 5(!) spoonfuls of sugar, pouring them so that they form 5 little mounds in the porridge in the shape of a cross before they dissolve.
5. Once again, he stirs it all very slowly.
6. If the bowl is too full at this point, he might eat a couple of spoonfuls to make room for step 7.
7. Then he takes a piece of brown bread and breaks it up into dozens of little pieces, giving each a little squeeze before dropping it into the mixture.
8. Now, after once again stirring everything very slowly and deliberately, he eats it.

The whole process takes around 15 minutes (I get impatient waiting for my toast!), and it only takes him about 2 minutes to eat it. He told me he feels like he’s taken lunch after he eats it. I can only imagaine!

*I truly hope this doesn’t dissuade anyone from trying it when they come to visit Africa. I also have a violent dislike of cottage cheese, so take whatever I say with a grain of salt.

What With the Carbo-Loading, It’s a Small Wonder They’re All Marathoners

While we’re on the subject of food (Jo, are you ever not on the subject of food?!), I wanted to give you an idea of what the meals are like here. Meals are structured very differently here than they are back home. At home, the focus of the meal is usually some kind of protein (unless, of course, we're having Mom’s homemade Mac & Cheese), with lots of vegetables (at least in theory) and some kind of starchy carbohydrate. Here, the carbs get all the glory. From what I understand, when you order a meal in a restaurant, you order the carb first, then say what kind of protein you'll have with it, e.g.: Ugali with Beef, Rice with Chicken, etc. I haven't really eaten in restaurants (I did eat at Carnivore in 2010, but it really doesn't help my case here), so my experiences have generally been at the various Apostles of Jesus Missions I have been staying at. I have never seen fewer than two carb-y dishes offered at a meal, but I am no longer surprised to see 4 or 5. Here’s an example of a meal I had in Uganda:

• Matooke (mashed bananas, but not sweet, and not exactly plantains. Think potatoes that grow on banana trees)
• Ugali (a thick, stiff cornmeal porridge, about the consistency of play-dough)
• Chips (French fries, but they like to credit the British instead)
• Ugandan sweet potatoes (distinctly different from American sweet potatoes)
• Rice (the universal food)
• Beans (the other universal food)
• Boiled pumpkin leaves (not unlike kale (which, for the record, is not chicken))

Of the first 5 dishes, there were huge pots, and everyone took large helpings of each. The beans were in a medium pot, and the pumpkin leaves seemed like they were added as an after thought, and people took the least amount of those. And this is not the most carb-heavy meal I have eaten. Sometimes, they might have chips and roasted potatoes (though they call them “Irish potatoes”, so as not to confuse them with sweet potatoes). Spaghetti is an occasional offering, but never with any sauce. Interestingly, bread isn’t really a thing. There’s usually bread on the breakfast table, but it’s store bought. If there’s going to be anything bread-like at dinner, it will be chapatti, flat bread transplanted from India (there is a huge Indian population in Kampala).

The protein generally depends on the region. When I was traveling around Lake Victoria, almost every meal was Tilapia (no complaints from this girl!). The fish was never fileted. Sometimes it was cut into pieces, but occasionally, I just got a whole fish plopped on my plate. I rose to the challenge and ate the entire thing from head to tail, including the eyes. I think I can say now, without fear of jinxing it, that I have officially made it the entire way around Lake Victoria without choking on a fishbone, though I did occasionally mutter prayers to St. Blaise as I ate.

Here in Kenya, we usually have beef or pork, chopped up into small pieces and either boiled or roasted, or chicken (you already know how I feel on chicken night). I’ve had goat occasionally, but that is one of the most expensive kinds of meat. I know that rabbit makes it to the table from time to time, but not since I’ve been here. Beans, blessed beans, are almost always an option.

However, even with all of this carbo-loading, it didn’t really make me want to run marathons. Mostly, I just wanted to take long naps.