Men's work, women's work...

Cooking in Musoma

So, how many creative things you make with tomatoes, onions, green peppers, and garlic? It seems that just about every meal I make has these four basic Musoma staples in some combination or other. For salsa, they are chopped finely and seasoned with a little hot pepper, lime, and salt. For stirfry, they are sauteed together. For soup, they get sauteed and then boiled. After a while, everything I make here starts to taste the same!

Since I now have the additional motivation of cooking for someone other than just myself, I'm trying to make a more concerted effort to make appealing meals. Earlier this week I invented a Musoma variation of Thai stirfry, which turned out well enough to make it for guests on Saturday! Spaghetti noodles on the bottom substituted for Thai stirfry noodles. Stirfried green beans, green peppers, carrots, and onions were layered on top of that. Some nice (tough) Musoma beef was stirfried and layered over that (I used scrambled eggs for the guests, which worked well, too). Finally, I whipped up some peanut sauce to top it all off. Peanut butter, lime, soy sauce, garlic, ginger, sugar, hot chili sauce, water, coconut milk, vinegar, and a little bit of the one Thai sauce available in Kenya, and voila! Thai Peanut stirfry over noodles, ready to go.

Today I did some Indian-themed cooking for us. My trusty friends, garlic, green pepper, onion, and tomoato, joined up again for some stirfry action. With the addition of lentils (which are different here than in the States), carrots, lime, ginger, salt, and garam masala spice mix, voila! Indian lentil dish ready to spoon over potatoes.

Fortunately, Andrew likes garlic, green pepper, tomatoes (cooked only!), and onion. Carrots and green beans make a good addition most all the time, too. Hey, food here might be limited in variety, but I'm determined to make some interesting meals for us out of them!

Lake Victoria

Musoma Market

Although some people find the busy market intimidating, I love shopping for fruits and vegetables in Musoma! If you like farmers' markets with stands spilling over with produce, you'd enjoy our town market here. It might not rival Costco or Safeway for variety, but I think it holds its own if you're comparing prices. Green peppers at about seven cents apiece? Tomatoes for around 50 cents a pound? A pineapple for just over one dollar? Not bad! However, eggs go for about two dollars a dozen and sugar for 65 cents a pound, so not everything is too different in price from the States. Also, if you want something a bit out of the ordinary (meaning, not locally grown), you're out of luck.

Most stands have the same things, so it can be difficult to decide from whom to buy. There are a few sellers that I tend to frequent, simply because I've gotten to know them a bit. True, the man from whom I buy my cabbages often has better cabbages than others, but really, I just like buying my cabbage from him. He knows I like the smaller, cleaner ones and picks me out a good one. And the man from whom I buy bananas knows I like ones that are still mostly green, and that if he and I don't have the correct change between us to make it come out even, I'll be back next week and we'll even up then.

I also buy cat food at the market. Clive and Betsy eat dried little fish called 'dagaa', which is sold by the pile. I take a Tupperware with me and have the woman selling it scoop the fish right into the container. How the lid seals so tightly mystifies her, I think! But those little fish stink, let me tell you, so I keep it in the freezer in the Tupperware. Dagaa is a staple protein of Tanzanians, since it's pretty inexpensive, even by Tanzanian standards. I am too embarrassed to tell her that I feed the dagaa to cats - the seller probably things I'm just one of the few Americans that actually likes to eat it. However, dagaa is one food here that I just cannot bring myself to enjoy. But it's great cat food.

So, after I load up my basket and bring all of this produce home, the next job is to wash all the fruits and veggies. I scrub them under running water and then lay them out to dry on a towel. However, since the water here is not safe to drink, the vegetables are not safe to eat until they have completely dried. It's really important to wash them well, but almost even more important to dry them well. For things that will be boiled before eating, like green beans, I don't wash those. But the pineapple, mangoes, bananas, passion fruit, and papaya that get put into tropical fruit smoothies have to be scrubbed and dried before I cut them up and blend them into a fabulously refreshing drink. And, after a hot day here, there's nothing like cold, semi-frozen fruit whipped into a smoothie!

Betsy

Betsy may be a wee little thing and a bit of a fraidy cat, but don't underestimate her hunting prowess! She can leap six feet up on the wall to snatch geckos, wait hours to pounce on a cockroach the moment it emerges out from under a cabinet, and snag birds on the occasions when she ventures outdoors. She's pretty much an indoor hunter, though. We've got enough stuff inside to keep her busy.

She's named after Betsy Stockton, the first single female missionary of the modern era. In the late 1800s, Betsy Stockton, a former slave, felt called to be a missionary. However, people were shocked that a single woman, and an African-American at that, would even think of going out as a missionary. She was determined, though, knowing God had called her to serve abroad. Finally, one mission board accepted her to go to Hawaii as a missionary on the condition she accompany a white family as their servant. She humbly agreed, and ended up running a school and a nursing clinic and was the strong support that took care of the whole mission there and kept the work running and the missionaries functional. I was so impressed with this woman when I first heard about her that I named my beautiful little kitten after her. (Side note: Clive, featured in a previous post, is named after C. S. Lewis.)