Sunday surprise

So, this flew into my yard today. I have seen this bird at a zoo before, and never expected to see it anywhere else. I sat on the ground for a long time taking pictures and just enjoying the weirdness of it. It made my whole day seem better.



So did these. I don't miss having an oven very often, except when I want dessert. This is what I have been making instead.

Crepes with Passion Fruit Sauce

Crepes:

I've been trying out different recipes and this is the one I have liked best.

Make the crepe batter
4 eggs, lightly beaten
1 1/3 cups milk (or that much water and about 3 spoonfuls of Nido)
2 tablespoons butter, melted (or margarine)
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons white sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt

1. Whisk together eggs, milk, melted butter, flour sugar and salt until it's smooth. You can let it rest while you make the sauce.
2. Heat a medium-sized skillet (nonstick if you have it) over medium heat. Grease pan with a small amount of margarine or oil. Spoon about 1/4 cup of crepe batter into the hot pan, tilting the pan so that bottom surface is evenly coated. Cook over medium heat, 1 to 2 minutes on a side, or until golden brown.

Passion Fruit Sauce

Put into a blender:
12 passion fruits (cut in half, scoop out seeds and pulp)
1 orange -- juiced with seeds removed.
a few spoonfuls of sugar and about 2oz of water

Puree in a food processor for 20 seconds, dump it into a pan and boil for about 2 minutes. Taste and adjust with more sugar or some honey. Strain through a sieve, stirring and mashing around with a ladle or wooden spoon.

It doesn't make a lot, but it's concentrated, so a little goes a long way. We've had it on pancakes, too, and it was great.

Another week

When they say this is the rainy season, they are not joking. It's pouring down rain now, even though it was sunny and hot this morning. Tom and I went to visit a nearby school to meet the members of its anti-AIDS club. It was a 45 minute uphill walk, with pretty views across the valley to our own town on the opposite hill. We walked past tidy mud brick houses with little gardens that looked like the pages of a fairy-tale, minus the banana trees and sorghum fields on either side. We spoke to lots of kids in kinyarwanda, saying what our names were, asking them theirs, and saying, no, we aren't going to give you money. I shook lots of little hands, like I do every day, which is probably why I have conjunctivitis right now. Oh well.

So, we got to our secondary school, which is on top of the hill. Like lots of places in Rwanda, I find it almost impossibly beautiful. Most of the time, when I comment on how pretty a place is, people seem bemused by it, like, "this? you think this is pretty? why?" Anyway, when we got to the school, we found that the club had actually started earlier than we thought, and the peer educator was already at the front of the packed classroom (all the benches were more than full with over 60 kids), nonchalantly holding a hand-carved wooden penis model, which he occasionally knocked against a desk like a gavel when the kids were getting too loud.

I was surprised at how much I could follow of the conversation in Kinyarwanda. They were talking about the reproductive system, why girls have their period, the difference between sperm and semen, and they even asked me directly if girls could have erections. It sort of warmed my heart, especially when they followed all this information with practical talk about how to prevent HIV, teen pregnancy, and other unpleasant things. I'm used to hearing about the ABCs of HIV prevention -- abstinence, be faithful, and use condoms, and often hear about condoms falling off the radar. However, today I learned that in this club, they talk about abstinence, faithfulness, condom use, and education. I'm excited to visit again next week.

Things haven't been completely smooth this week. I still don't have a lot of definition in my job, and I haven't been able to meet a lot of the people I need to. It can be really hard to be here, to know there is so much work to be done, and not be able to get started. Luckily, next week is looking busier than the last, and I'm excited.

Anyone who knows me and/or Tom knows that we're kind of food-oriented people. We really like Rwandan food -- ubugari, isombe, ibishyimbo, etc., but since getting to site, we've been cooking a lot, and probably more creatively than we have in a long time. I came to Rwanda prepared to make a lot of Indian food, since I knew that you can make a curry out of anything on any kind of stove, as long as you have some spices. So, since I was particularly happy with lunch today, I thought I would share some recipes.

First off, I should say that the produce here is amazing. All of you locavores spending lots of money at organic farmers markets, eat your heart out. That's our only option, and it's cheap as hell. Butter? That will be almost $10 a pound, and you can only get it in Kigali, the capital. Processed foods? A tiny can of "pressed cheddar" is too much for my peace corps stipend. But buckets of tomatoes, green beans, beets, carrots, onions, and more are cheap and great. The sweetest pineapple you've ever had costs 100 Rwandan francs-- the same price as one egg (and you can get almost six for the equivalent of a dollar). One vegetable that I've really wanted to like were the little eggplants. I mean, I love eggplant, and they look really good, but they are the most bitter I've ever had. I kept trying them at restaurants or at our training center, and was always completely disappointed. But at the market, they're incredibly cheap. Tom and I decided to experiment with them by trying to make Indian pickle- the really spicy, really sour condiment you can get at Indian buffets, thinking that maybe it would cut the bitterness. What we ended up with was not pickle, but was really, really good. Still bitter, but in a very doable way.

Recipe:
Cut a bunch of little eggplants (we bought a little plastic bucketful. Maybe a kilo or so?) cut into 1/4” x 1” strips
1/2 cup vegetable oil (this was according to a recipe we adapted, and I'll probably try it with half as much oil next time and see what happens.)
1 tsp salt, or more to taste
4 inch chunk of fresh ginger, minced into paste (we can get this in our local market, not sure about elsewhere, and I think it could work without it.
1/2 bulb (8 cloves) garlic, minced into paste

Spices:
2 tsp mustard powder, or more to taste
1 tsp turmeric powder
1 tsp hot red chili powder or more to taste
1 tsp ground cumin seeds
I have all of these, and know you can get them relatively inexpensively in Kigali, but I also think that it would be worth trying them with the little packets of curry powder you can buy in most markets.

1 TB sugar
3/4 cup vinegar (the stuff we can get here is called "imitation table vinegar," which sounds bad, but works fine.)

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Heat the oil in a skillet and fry the garlic & ginger till golden brown, then remove from heat.
2. Add eggplant, salt mustard powder, turmeric, red chilli powder, and cumin into the ginger and garlic. Cook for 5 minutes until the eggplant just starts to collapse (kind of al dente).
3. In a separate pan dissolve the sugar in vinegar by heating on a low heat, then remove.
4. Add the sugar and vinegar mixture to the eggplant mixture and simmer for about one minute more, then remove.

That’s it. To go with it, we also made lentils, which I like as an alternative to the beans we have a lot (and instead of the meat I can’t bring myself to buy, because I bring myself to go into the butcher shop, or to buy and kill an animal myself. Yet.) I can’t get lentils here, but bags of them are fairly cheap in Kigali.

I like to use this simple recipe from Madhur Jarrfey’s book, “Indian Cooking”

4 Tbs Vegetable oil (can get away with less oil)
½ tsp whole cumin seeds (again, I think it could be interesting to experiment with curry powder, but I haven’t tried it yet)
4 cloves of garlic, peeled and finely chopped (the garlic is so mild here, you could use even more)
1 medium onion, peeled and chopped
1 c. lentils (any kind – I’ve used red (masoor) lentils and moong dal), washed and drained
3 cups water
1 tsp. salt
¼ tsp of cayenne (or to taste)

Heat the oil over a flame (medium, if you have control over that kind of thing). When it’s hot, add the cumin seeds, and a few seconds later, the garlic. Stir, and when the garlic turns brown, add the onion. Stir and fry until the onion pieces brown at the edges. Add the lentils and water and bring to a boil. Cover the pan, turn heat to low, and simmer for an hour or until the lentils are tender (check after 45 minutes or so). Add salt and cayenne, stir, and simmer for another 5 minutes.

So, to finish things off, we made chapattis. Chapatis are wonderful. I love them. They’re basically wheat tortillas, so I’ve been making tacos with them and eating them with guacamole as well as with Indian food. A bonus is that in India, they’re made with whole-wheat flour. I eat a lot of starches here in Rwanda (just like everyone else), but I’ve had a hard time finding whole grains. However, in Kigali, it wasn’t hard to find the kind of whole wheat flour made specifically for chapatti, called atta, plus it was even cheaper than the regular refined flour, which itself is not expensive. Anyway, they’re great. Again from Madhur Jaffrey:

Mix 2 ½ cups atta or regular flour and about ¾ cup of water. That’s it. Add some salt if you want.

When it comes together as a soft dough, knead for 6-8 minutes. I stretch the ball of dough out with the heel of my hand, fold it back on itself, give the ball a quarter turn, and repeat. After about 6 minutes it will be smooth. Put it in a bowl covered with a damp cloth for half an hour.

When you’re ready, put a frying pan on the stove (cast iron is good, if you have it) on a medium low flame (again, if you can control that kind of thing). Knead the dough a few times, then divide it into 15 little balls. Flour your work surface (it takes a good bit of flour to roll them out, so while I use whole wheat flour to make the dough, I use regular flour at this stage to conserve the stuff I can’t get at my local market). Roll a ball in flour, press down to make a patty, then roll it out. If you have a rolling pin, great, but if not, a Nalgene bottle works too. Dust it flour frequently while roll it out into a 5 ½ inch circle. Pat it between your hands to shake off the extra flour, and then slap it onto your hot pan. Cook it until it looks done on the bottom, then flip it over (this takes less than a minute). Now, when I flip mine over, they puff up with steam like little balloons. The traditional Indian way of making these is that after you cook the second side, you put the chapatti directly on hot charcoal and then flip it over, which also puffs it up. Madhur Jaffrey says that she flips the chapatti over with her hand, but when I tried that, I got a really painful steam burn on my finger. You have been warned.

As you finish them, stack them in a bowl lined with a dishtowel to keep them warm. They’re best right away, but can last a day or two in a ziplock bag (otherwise they dry out by the second day).

OK, I’m done nerding out. Comment if you try any of these, or if you have any suggestions!

So, I'm now in my new home in Eastern Rwanda. It's a great post, not a big city, but not so rural that I can't find food outside of market days. One of the weirdest things about living here is that there is a Chinese medical mission that provides doctors for the local hospital. They've been doing this a long time, and as a result, everyone thinks I am Chinese. Yesterday, I was walking down the street, and a kid starting yelling out the window of his classroom, "muzungu! umuchinois! ni hao! ni hao!" Kids say ni hao to Tom and I ALL THE TIME. And when I mention how weird this is to one of my Engilsh speaking Rwandan friends, they said, "well, I can see how you seem Chinese. You have dark hair, you like to take walks." This did not illuminate things for me. Also, it has been amusing me that frequently when telling people that Tom is my husband, they look confused, and ask if we're brother and sister, because we look alike. Which is something that has never been said about us before.

I mean, do you see it?