Small successes

Yesterday I cooked an entire meal for my family by myself. Ordinarily this would be no big feat. It wasn't even anything elaborate (spaghetti and spinach). However, nothing is quite as simple as it would be at home here. First, let me just say I love my mama teKenya. She knows I hate cooking so most days I get by with just helping chop vegetables and setting the table. But, this past weekend my broter cooked me lunch and I am trying show him reciprocity and that gender roles don't have to be pre-determined so I decided to cook two of his favorites for dinner Monday. If I were cooking this in America, what would I do? Put two pots on the stove, one for the spaghetti and one for the spinach and start a pan for the sauce. Thirty mintues later, we would be eating. Let's see how things are a bit different here:

1) The "kitchen". Our kitchen is a wooden shack in front of the main house. There is a dirt floor, a bench, a wooden stump (for sitting by the fire), three cinderblocks under which the wood is burned and a cupboard with various dishes and utensils. So, the first thing I have to do is start the fire. I am not good at this and it gives my family hours of amusement to watch me try. Ok, now the fire is going but I can only put one pot on at a time...

2) Space. There's no cutting board or island or counter to set things on. I chopped the spinach just with it in my hands (you cut into your hand- directly contrary to all knife admonitions from childhood) into a plastic bowl and chopped the onions directly into the pan with oil.

3) Convenience. After I put the spinach in the pot I realized I needed some water to cook it down. I have to go around back of the house to the water tank and fill up a bucket. Oh, the water bucket has leftover milk from the cow in it. Now I have to wash the bucket and then fill it up with water. And quickly before the spinach burns. Ok, the spinach is now simmering, time to start the spaghetti.

4) The stove. My family uses a combination of wood-burning fire and a charcoal stove (jiko) to cook. So we light the jiko, fill it with charcoal and set a pot of water on there to boil for the spaghetti. In the meantime the spinach is cooking too fast...

5)Temperature control. Part of the difficulty in cooking here is you never know what temperature you are at. There is no oven telling you 350 degrees, no burner to set to hi-med-low. When it's too hot, you take a log out. Not enough heat? Add some more wood!

6) Vision. It gets dark between 6:45 and 7 here and I get home at 6:30 so there is only a bit of a window when I can actually see what I'm cooking. I try to use the kerosene lamp to peer over the pot but then I get a blast of heat and smoke and I can't see anything. I spent about 30 minutes crying in the kitchen between the onions and the smoke :-( This also is amusing to my mama because of course it doesn't bother her eyes. She also doesn't use anything to remove pots from the fire half the time.

All in all, the meal turned out well. The spaghetti got a little overcooked because I was trying to get the sauce together and couldn't get to the jiko for a couple of minutes to check on it. And the sauce was a bit bland because I only had onion, tomatoes, tomato paste, and salt to work with. Garlic and cilantro are available but only on market days (Saturday and Tuesday). My family liked it (at least they said they did) and they ate it so I call that a success!