Cooking is not my thing. I don’t know why, maybe because when our kids were little I didn’t have the energy at the end of the day to cook and so never really got into cooking. Yea I know, I shouldn’t have fed my kids all those boxed macaroni & cheese meals, fishsticks and hot dogs but we sure did have a good time playing before and after a quick dinner!
Anyway, as the kids have gotten older (23, 21, 19,18) I’m even less into cooking, they come home at all different times and get their own food for their meals. So Chuck and I are on our own, unless of course one of the kids offer us a meal (which occurs pretty often, thanks kids)!
Cooking in Tala (and most everywhere in Kenya) however is a multi-day event. Ann, the cook at Nice View will begin cooking lunch as soon as the porridge is served at 10. Lunch will be served to them at around 1:30, so she is prepping/preparing/cooking all day long. She also stays and cooks dinner for the kids who live at the orphanage, but for dinner she does have some of the children help her with the preparation work.
One day Ruth (a friend in Tala) wanted to cook lunch for us so I helped and this is how it went:
- Beans are sorted through the day before for stones/sticks/bad beans and soaked overnight so are now ready to be cooked.
- Go to the market in the morning to pick up vegetables (cabbage, onions and tomatoes) spices and herbs (garlic and cilantro which is always fresh) and if we have the funds we’ll pick up some meat (this time we picked up goat intestines).
Usually we eat exactly what the kids eats, beans/maize mixture with some cabbage or skuma (it’s like spinach), but this day since Ruth wanted to cook she added meat and spices. - Stop at a kiosk for paraffin (kerosene) for the cook stove (it’s like a one burner camp stove pictured here). We usually take an empty water bottle with us for transporting it back home.
- Take everything home and start cutting the vegetables and meat and grinding the spices. This takes at least an hour but it’s a fun time since we are working together.
- While we are cutting and grinding items the beans are cooking. The beans are taken off the stove and covered for later. Usually a pot of water is then put on the stove and the intestines (or another type of meat) are boiled, but we cooked them in a pan with oil so they were browned and ‘roasted’.
- When the intestines are done they are taken off the stove and the vegetables and spices are then boiled.
- These are set aside and covered and then the cabbage or skuma is boiled.
- After the cabbage or skuma is finished cooking they are set aside
- Then the veggies and meat are mixed with the beans and put on the stove for warming.
- After it is warmed everything is put into hot pots, plates are stacked on a serving tray, glasses are washed, utensils are cleaned and salt is put on the tray. Then we take everything to the office where we always eat our lunch at Nice View Academy.
pictured from left and around the table: Robert (a friend from Phoenix who joined us for 2 weeks), Ruth (who I helped cook lunch with), Pauline (Gideon’s wife), Chuck and Gideon.
That whole process takes around 4-5 hours (not including the time spent sorting the beans and soaking them overnight). Now if we were to have chapati (a tortilla like bread) with lunch then someone else would have been called to help and to bring their own cook stove!
Cooking chapati takes a couple of hours by itself. Making the dough, taking a portion of the dough and making a ‘snake’ out of it, twisting that ‘snake’ into a swirl and lining them up (I never understood this part or if it has any significance to the actual making of the chapati). Then you take one swirl at a time and roll it out into a circle, so it basically looks like a tortilla. You put a bit of margarine on a chapati pan and if you are adept at cooking chapati you can put one chapati on the pan, flip it, put another on top of that, flip that one, then put another on top. So you are basically cooking three chapati at once-which makes it go a bit faster, but still a very time consuming ordeal.
Chapati was something we usually had at home, not at school, but the kids consider it a treat. Mercy Child Foundation requested the fixin’s for chapati one time and they were so thrilled – it was a treat that other families got to have so they felt blessed to have the opportunity to have it and help cook it with Anastacia, the house mom.
So for me, not being a cook, I was very thankful for Ruth’s direction and for Ann’s ability to cook for such a large number of kids (which included us everyday – thanks Ann!)
I am also thankful for your support, you are helping to keep the children fed and giving them a ‘treat’ of chapati once in awhile.