Swahili cookery class

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Yesterday we learned some more vocabulary for the kitchen by studying recipes for typical Tanzanian dishes. It felt a bit like watching a cookery show with our teachers lined up in front holding ingredients up and naming them in Swahili…
Today we ventured to another convent a little bit further outside Morogoro to actually do some Swahili cooking. The walk there was exciting enough passing through a brick making factory - house high piles of red bricks, that were covered in soil and then lit up in the middle to burn them.
The cooking was then took place outside - Tanzanians seem to cook mainly outside, with pots on charcoal fires and all preparation happening outdoors as well. The ingredients are pure and untreated, so the rice for example is being cleaned of little stones etc first, then thrown up in the air for a while, so that husks blow away. Then it’s being washed, before it is being used for cooking.
We made two rice dishes, a vegetarian pilaf and coconut rice. For the latter we got the opportunity to try out a strange local utensil: a little wooden chair that has got a small tongue shaped metal scraper with serrated edges. Sitting on this chair one scrapes the white flesh out of the coconut halves. As you keep the scraper sturdy with all your body weight, it’s actually a quite safe way to remove the flesh from the hard shells. But then after all the hard work, we didn’t strangely enough use the flesh or the original coconut milk itself, but made up some coconut flavoured water by mixing water with the coconut flesh and then filtering it through some cloths. That was then used to cook the rice with - which didn’t end up tasting that coconutty anyway.
The pilaf made for it and was really lovely! We also made a gorgeous stew with plantains and then we also brought along 2 living chicken, which killed, plugged and separated by some of our Philippino volunteers.

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