Culinary Successes and Failures

I love to blame things on the altitude – I can’t run, it’s the altitude. My fire won’t start – it’s the altitude. My students are squirrely – it’s the altitude. (I plan to use that one.) But with cooking, I think I really can blame the altitude.

In Charlotte, my 3 roommates and I would take turns cooking for the entire week, which was a good system. We came up with cooking superlatives one night – Jenny was the MVP, Erin the MIP, and Meg the MUP – Most Unpredictable (once we cooked pork loin for 5 hours . . . and ate at 8:30). I was the one without an acronym – the “Easiest Method” or “Most Likely to take a Shortcut” cook. I saw the value in saving time and buying marinated curried chicken and a bag of frozen biriyani (don’t forget the frozen nan!) from Trader Joe’s . . . presto, dinner is ready in 20 minutes, Indian Cuisine.

Alas, there is no frozen option in Kenya, at least that I can afford. I can’t even buy bagged lettuce. Cake mixes are $6 each and Ragu is around $8. So roll up your sleeves, folks, let’s start getting adventurous in the kitchen. My first failure was brownies. I LOVE CHOCOLATE and had dreamed of brownies for weeks . . . so I found a recipe online and went to it. No brownie mix, folks. Melt the chocolate with the butter, grease the pan (no cooking spray here!), light the oven with a match . . . way too much time and effort for brownies that came out completely flat and tasted like Blue Band, our fantastic margarine made from palm nut oil. I haven’t given up on the brownie adventure yet, I’m just waiting to use a recipe that uses cocoa powder instead of melted chocolate. I think that would be better for the altitude issue.

Time to share a success: American cereal is $10/box so I’ve been using the South African granola or muesli with yogurt for breakfast (I really don’t like it with milk). When I first got here, a dorm mom told me that she made her own yogurt – this completely freaked me out, but I soon saw the reasoning behind it. After grocery shopping a few times and paying close to a dollar for a Yoplait-sized container that tastes nothing like Yoplait, and then running out of yogurt before the next trip to Nairobi . . . I decided to give it a go. I followed the directions as best as I could – heat milk on the stove, cool it, add a yogurt culture, then keep it warm for 8 hours so it firms up. The first attempt was a failure, as the yogurt never firmed up. So I sought advice, changed a few things, and did it again . . . and success! Granted it didn’t taste like Yoplait either but I can excuse it when I made it myself.

It’s amazing what people make here – hot fudge sauce, tortillas, bagels, English Muffins, pizza sauce, pizza crust, ricotta cheese, cream cheese . . . amazing, I tell you. By the time I leave I’m going to be Super Cook, I know it.

There it is, homemade yogurt. And a lily from my garden.