Food Glorious Food

Food Glorious Food! 11th April

On Friday night we finished working at 10pm (we’ve got a lot of work on at the moment!) and returned back home to eat. For the first time, I was actively wishing that we had something other than our standard rice/potato/chapatti with chicken/fish/beef and dark green stringy vegetable. I lifted up the pot lids and what did I find…. Peas! Beans! Carrots! Cucumber!!!!! It was very exciting! Our food parcel had been flown in from Goma, which meant that we actually had some fresh vegetables. That was a good meal. It’s an interesting balance between getting in enough food and being able to store it – we only try to use the generator from 9am – 1pm and from 16.30 till we go to bed (though we hope the Government supply will be mended soon). Food in the fridge and freezer can therefore go off fairly quickly and we need to be careful to make sure things stay cold. There are some specially adapted foods; Blue Band margarine seems to be exactly like margarine in the UK except that you can keep it in the cupboard and it doesn’t melt in the heat.

Today (Sunday) our cook doesn’t work, which means we find our own food. Last week, on Easter Sunday we went to the Jay Hotel, which is about the only place in Kindu you can get a decent meal. You order your food, pay for it and go home. Then they go out and buy the food and cook it for you. 3 hours later you go back to eat – tis quite a different restaurant service from what we are used to! Of course, with food prices being what they are in Kindu, it cost $25 for some lamb and mashed potato (obviously no veg…!) which is possibly the most expensive meal I’ve ever eaten. Therefore, only something to do as a special occasion!
So this Sunday, we decided to cook for ourselves. I decided to do boiled potatoes, with green beans, peas and an omelette – a simple meal I can cook in about 30 minutes at home.

It took 2 hours.

First I had to find something with which to scrub the potatoes. There were no small knives, and the only brush looked like it might have been a hairbrush, and was crawling with insects, so I resorted to using my fingers (will have to find out what Mama Makubwa normally uses). Then I had to go and get the generator turned on so I could use the cooker. The cooker is slightly temperamental, which means that only a couple of hobs work at any one time, so by the time I’d puzzled over why the peas weren’t boiling they were somewhat behind schedule. And these aren’t the nice ‘freshly frozen garden peas’ you get in the UK, these are a slightly murky looking green and brown pea that take about 20 minutes to cook and don’t have anywhere near as good a flavour. The tilting pan meant that the omelette was burnt in some places and runny in others, and the only wooden spatula was about a metre long so not particularly usable. I knocked a frying pan off the wall, which deposited some sort of sooty residue on my shoulder, and almost brained Benoit when I accidentally pulled off a wooden board with pegs off the wall (that one definitely fails the health and safety test). The kitchen is officially my least favourite room in our house. However, at the end of it all we ate a fairly tasty meal that even reminded me of a meal in the UK. It also made me very glad that we don’t have to cook every day and increased my respect for Mama Makubwa. I can see why we need a full time cook now….! I think we’ll also try and get some more equipment for her…..

(Edit - I made pasta and vegetables in tomato sauce for dinner. It was much easier and even edible!)
(Edit 2 - It wasn't as bad as it sounds above - at least, it wasn't frustrating me that much, more amusing to reflect on!)

Meals here generally take quite a long time to eat – at least half an hour. Apart from the quantity, you also have to do things like remove all the bones from the fish. As there are a great many bones, and we have fish 1 in every 3 meals, it’s a fairly regular chore at which I am still definitely not expert. Apparently it’s possible to eat a lot of the smaller bones because they’ll snap easily, but I think it was dinned into me from an early age that bones = danger, and must be avoided at all costs. The first 15 minutes of every fish meal is therefore spent removing about a hundred bones from my food, before I can properly enjoy the (very tasty) fish. And trying to eat an orange takes another 15 minutes or so – at least we can use the pips to try and plant orange trees!

Verdict on food: Tedious but edible, simple things become treats, prefer not to cook it myself, looking forward to a pizza.