Launch new blog style

Yay! We figured out how to add our own picture as the background to our blog. Yes, we still have a few more tweaks to make it look exactly like want, but we thought you'd enjoy this picture of a smelly old  elephant - and to prove that WE took this picture, here's a shot of us with that same elephant. (We'd backed a little farther away by the time our friends had a chance to take the shot.) More on the safari later, but first we need to fill you in on Maulidi in Lamu (stay tuned)

On the Road Again

Well, our time in Lamu has come to an end. Its been a wonderful two months full of people and memories I will always cherish. I thought it fitting to pay homage to some of the little things I love about Lamu and make it such a unique place by sharing some of them with you. Enjoy!

Green coconuts. The vendors chop the top off the coconut and hand it to you to drink. There's nothing like fresh coconut water on a hot day

People who sell weird combinations of things, like this woman; homemade snuff, honey and detergent. Mmm!

Riyadha Mosque. Not only do I love the architecture, but this is where all the good parties were at celebrating the prophet Muhammed's birth. Good times!


Random Donkeys.

Building sand castles with Daren. We were inspired by the "castle" shown in the background. (note the random donkeys)

Kayaking around Lamu in the mangroves

Modeling my teacher's heena design for the annual heena competition and winning! The judges loved the peacock.

The view from our balcony at high tide.

Lamu town's skinny alleys.

The chicken ladies who sit around and watch their chickens lay eggs. when they say fresh eggs for sale, they mean fresh! They also don't mind sending you home with a very live chicken you can slaughter for dinner. One woman offered to give me a good deal on a particularily scrawny looking hen; I declined.

Big, fresh samaki (fish)!

Grain markets. I loved seeing baskets and baskets of colorful grains, half of which I had never seen before! My fave new legume is pigeon peas.

And of course, sharing it all with Daren.

Day 7: the Final Lamu Foodie Post

Sambosas

I was lucky enough to have Badria also teach me to cook another of my favorite street foods: the sambosa. Once in a while, especially during maulidi (Islamic festival celebrating the birth of the prophet Muhammad) when both Daren and I left the house at 7:30 a.m. and didn't return until 11 p.m., I would run out the door and down the street to get sambosas from a middle aged woman who sits on the side of the street with a boiling pot of mafuta (oil) and a sambosas piled on fresh newspaper. I'd sometimes watch as she folded the dough to make the small pouch she filled with flavorful minced meat and then grab by the handfuls and drop into the sizzling oil, the smooth dough crinkling and bubbling as the sambosas hit the mafuta. I would hand the sambosa lady— for so I dubbed her— 50 shillings and she'd wrap eight golden crisp sambosas in a sheet of newsprint from an Arabic newspaper (from Dubai of all places) and then hand them to me, the heat from them burning through the thin paper and warming my fingers as I took them. I'd stop by on the way home to grab a couple of ginger or pineapple sodas, knowing the cold glass soda bottles would sweat in my hands and cool me off as I walked the winding streets back home. Sambosas and soda; the perfect end to a long day.





Anyways, here's the recipe. You can just use won ton skins or egg roll skins which are paper-thin sheets of dough made from flour, eggs and salt, and used to make WON TON, EGG ROLLS and similar preparations. WON TON skins can be purchased prepackaged in some supermarkets and in most Chinese markets. The wrappers usually come in both squares and circles and are available in various thicknesses (use the round and thin ones). What's important while making the sambosas is to make sure the oil in your wok is really hot and especially to make sure to fold the egg roll skins tightly so no oil can get to the ingredients inside the sambosa (Badria really stressed this, saying that the flavor of the sambosas would be completely sapped if any oil got inside).

Sambosa Stuffing:

1/2 kilo ground beef
2 large carrots diced finely
4-5 medium onions diced finely
Half a lime
Cinnamon
Salt and pepper to taste (some of the best sambosas have hot chilies diced in them too)

Sauté beef first, adding salt, pepper and cinnamon (this really adds a unique taste). When the beef is almost done add the onions and carrots and squeeze the lime into the beef. Cook a little longer until meat is done and then use mixture to stuff an egg-roll skin. Badria also made a flour and water paste to help seal the edges and keep the oil from getting in when they are being deep fried.





To give you an idea of how to fold the skin, take the thin round skins and cut into quarters like a four piece pie. Then, with the point of the pie wedge pointing toward your chest while it rests in
the palm of your hand, take one of the corners of the rounded edge and turn it up and over toward the middle and then rub the flour water paste on the turned flap. Do the same with the other side, lapping it over the corner you first turned and sealing them together by pressing them with the flour paste you previously put on between them. You should have a diamond shaped pocket with a flap. Stuff, but do not fill all the way, then take the lip of the pocket (not the flap) and tuck it over the stuffing (this is why you didn't want to stuff it all the way). Spread more paste over the skin and fold the flap over letting it stick to the paste to secure it. You should now have a triangular shaped sambosa ready to deep fry. Make sure the three corners you've created are sealed and don’t have holes, you don’t want oil seeping in.

This recipe should be a little easier to make than the mandazi, especially since you can buy the dough pre-packaged. And for you busy folks out there, like I said, soda and sambosas; perfect end to a long day.

Day 6: a Foodie in Lamu

Day 6: Mandazi

As I was munching on a mandazi, enjoying the aroma and taste of the slightly sweet cinnamon and cardamom wedge of piping hot bread, I thought to myself, by Jove*, (I think I speak with a British accent in my head), I shouldn't just sit here enjoying this scrumptious treat, I should learn how to make it! And with that, I walk over to the woman who made the best mandazi in town and asked her to teach me. I think me gushing about how wonderful her mandazi were and how none other could compare loosened her right up, because she readily agreed to show me how to cook them. She gave me the list of ingredients and we agreed to meet one early morning the following week. Her name is Badria.

I bustled into Badria's small compound, a sturdy house which she shares with her husband and six children, and plopped my arm load of flour and sugar, amongst other things, down on the cement bench which she uses as her counter for crushing herbs and spices and rolling out dough while not sitting on it. Anyways, here's what she taught me.

100 grams Cowboy (cooking lard/butter)
1 kg. Dola white flour
200grams white sugar
1 tbs. Freshly crushed cardamom
1 tbs. Yeast
2 coconuts scraped and milk extracted into first milk and second milk

Melt Cowboy and mix by hand in bowl with 3/4 package of flour. Add sugar, cardamom, 1/2 tbs. Of the yeast and 1 and 1/2 cups of the coconut milk (second milk to begin with). More mixing with hand for about a min. then add rest of yeast, first milk, knead, add more milk, knead, add a little more milk and rest of flour as you go except for a little flour to use during rising. Then knead a lot more! The dough should be very smooth and not sticky when you finish kneading. Then prepare the dough for rising by pinching a good handful of dough and smoothing it by pushing the middle of the dough ball with your thumbs and then pinching the dough pocket you’ve created by squeezing the bottom of it between your thumb and forefinger and pinching it off from the rest of the dough ball (bakers do this a lot with breads, turning the edges of the dough under and forming it into a smooth ball so it rises well, this is just on a way smaller scale). The dough balls should be a little bigger than a golf ball. Dust the bottom of the newly rounded dough balls with flour and cover and let rise on a cookie sheet for one hour (my batch made around seventeen balls, so you should be pretty close to there).

After rising, roll dough balls out, each ball into a 6 inch circle, then cutting the circle down the middle and across the center so you have four pies shaped pieces of dough.

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Badria rolling out the dough

Dust each triangle with flour on both sides to keep them from sticking together and then stack on top of each other. You'll want to roll and cut all the dough balls before you begin frying. Boil a whole lot of oil in a wok on high heat. When the oil is fully heated, drop the dough triangles into the boiling oil and deep fry the little suckers! Great fun to watch them puff up and expand. Make sure to keep turning them with a large cooking spoon ( the ones with holes in them) so they don’t burn.

me having fun cooking over a wood fire

They are ready when they are a wonderful golden brown (see pics). Badria uses a strainer to put them in when she first take them out and then moves those out into a huge bowl lined with newspaper, putting the next batch into the strainer.

Badria and me with the fininshed product, 68 mandazi!

If any of you are brave enough to try this at home, I'd love to hear how it goes! But for those more timid in the kitchen, I'd be happy to show you how to cook these delicious Mandazi when I get home. Good luck!

*By Jove!: Jupiter (Latin: Iuppiter) or Jove was the king of the gods, and the god of sky and thunder in Roman mythology. It was once believed that the Roman god Jupiter (Zeus in Greece) was in charge of cosmic Justice, and in ancient Rome, in their courts of law people swore by Jove to witness the oath,[11] which lead to the common expression "By Jove!", still used as an archaism today.

I didn't realise i was swearing by a mythological god until spell checker said I needed to capitalize "Jove" and I looked it up. I wonder what else i accidentally swear by in my British accent thoughts?

Dhou Trip to Manda Toto

I grew a beard since our last post. No special reason other than laziness I suppose. While I was in Mombasa finding us a place to live and visiting the Maulidi celebrations there I somehow stopped shaving and never went back (until sometime last Thursday). The only consequence of the beard seems to be that more people just assume I'm a Muslim (beards are common here among the respectable folk) or that I look like a demon, according to Patience's friend Nazra. In any case, at least I'm fulfilling the cliche about bearded African historians (seriously, most of the historians I meet studying Africa have a beard, or used to). Anyway, after a long packed week of attending and filming and recording as much of the various activities associated with the Grand Maulidi in Lamu two weeks ago, Patience and I welcomed our friends Siddhartha and Kim Herdegen to Lamu and began showing them around the Island. First, lunch at Whispers Cafe, then a day at Shela beach, and on Saturday (once I finished my other committments) a full day snorkeling expedition to the reef between Manda Toto and Pate island. The kanga wrapped around my head is for the sun, not because that's how they wear it around here.

After a leisurely ride out to the reef, during which we caught up on sleep from our 6 am awakening to meet the tide, we jumped right in and started snorkeling. The water was beautiful and warm, just a little silty, but visibility was wonderful. Unfortunately we don't have an underwater camera, but our captain (and expert fish spearer) grabbed these off the bottom of the ocean floor with his bare hands (no joke, Patience and I watched him wrestle that lobster from a crevice). Otherwise we saw several types of coral, anemone, fish (lion, parrot, zebra, and skinny little flourescent ones in abundance). We moved to two places along the reef and Patience and I each salvaged partial sea urchin skeletons from the ocean floor, only to find a perfectly intact one on the beach after the others had broken into smithereens. Patience also found a sea biscuit on the sea floor. After a couple swims we were ready for lunch and they took us to Manda Toto to rest. To our chagrine the captain sold the lobster to someone from another boat! But we had a great feast of Parrot Fish curry, rice, octopus (a little chewy), salad and something else that I forget. Then it was time to head back to Lamu.

View of our sail on the return trip.

First sight of Lamu on the return trip.