Tanzanian Cooking Class

Last Friday our teachers gave us a project day instead of our normal lessons.  They showed us how to make a bunch of different Tanzanian foods--and let us participate!  (We also learned a ton of new vocabulary in the process... including what has to be one of my favorite Swahili words: pili pili ho ho -- it's a pepper!)

Coconuts are used for a lot of things, especially in the coastal areas.  We cracked them open with a solid metal pestle (you know, "mortar and pestle").  Shona's broke open a lot more neatly than mine. :)

To get the coconut "meat" out of the shell, we sat on these special stools, nicknamed "goats."  On one end is a stick with a rounded blade at the end.  By rolling the coconut half over the blade--over and over--we scraped out all the good stuff.

They use the coconut mostly for what you can squeeze out of the white "meat."  In order to get this "juice" you pour a little warm water onto your mound of coconut shavings and squeeze it out, yeilding a nice rich liquid.  You repeat the process a few times, but that "first milk" is the best.  It gets saved, to be added last into what you're cooking.

Then there the rice.  The mills here don't have machinery specialized enough to get all the tiny bits of things out of the rice, so you have to do that.  First you go through and pick out any little stones you can see... as demonstrated by Dorien and Andre.

Then you sort out the lighter, invisible things using the large flat basket.  One of the verbs we learned was for that process; my best translation for that one word is: "toss rice up in the air so that the little bits of chaff(?) float away."  In this picture, I think Dorien and I were laughing about how much rice we'd managed to slosh out of the basket.

Another thing I enjoyed was making sambusas.  They are made with strips of dough folded into a triangular pocket; ground meat, onions, and maybe other things go inside.  Then it's fried.  The process for the dough alone is daunting... it gets rolled out, stacked, partially cooked, folded, cut, peeled apart... I forget it all.  But I love the finished product.

After working from 8:00 to 2:00, we finally were able to enjoy the feast we'd prepared.  I admit, I enjoyed the preparing more than some of the dishes themselves... not used to it all yet. :)  But it was a great experience, and we were all proud of ourselves!