Cooking

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Mzungu can’t cook! Well at least that’s what everyone thinks out here and has no qualms about telling us so either. We’ve been trying for several weeks now to cook pancakes for everyone but it’s been like climbing a rock face with no ropes. You can’t possibly cook; no; why?- we will cook for you; it’s too difficult for you on open fire (which is all they have at the parish) - you must use paraffin stove but we will have to get some paraffin!

Rich people have house-help out here and so I guess they assume that all mzungu have house-help and hence don’t know how to cook…..and seemingly are not capable of learning either.

Well I got fed up and went and bought some paraffin and all the ingredients we needed for the pancakes and then the last battle was getting them to give us the paraffin stove! What seemed like all of a sudden, (although I’m sure it was planned and we just weren’t aware) but the cook has gone away for a few days and not been replaced so we piped up and said we WANTED to cook and after much persuasion we were allowed.

It caused a HUGE amount of amusement and the whole village heard we were cooking and asked how the food was afterwards. When we managed our first meal (!) and succeeded we were given a bit of slack and left to cook the evening meal in peace. We made veg stew, naan bread, guacamole and then cinnamon pancakes for dessert. Everyone seemingly loved it and all commented on how nice it was to have something different from matooke and rice everyday…tu m’etonnes!

I think we proved we can cook and so now it isn’t so hard to get them to let us cook, plus we made them a cake in the local bakery oven which went down really well!

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