still cooking

                I love to eat.  If I actually ate everything that I really wanted to, I’d be morbidly obese.  Wouldn’t we all?  It always seems like the best tasting stuff is the worst for you.

                Since I love to eat, I also love to cook.  In fact, I used to write regularly in a cooking blog.  Before I left for the Peace Corps, I spent the summer in Buenos Aires, with nothing to do all day but go sight-seeing and cook delicious food.  It was a self-indulgent two months before leaving for the middle of nowhere, Africa.

Since last July, I’ve regrettably stopped writing in that blog.  I think one of the most important parts of a food blog is seeing pictures of the food you’re going to cook, and the internet connection in Africa is less than capable of loading pictures on to a blog.  I tried once, and the “loading” bar said that it would be an hour and a half before any picture showed up.  Not worth it.  Sorry to all of my Mustgo Food readers (that’s you, Mom and Grandma!)

But I’m still cooking.  It’s been quite the adventure to figure out how to use a Dutch oven, and how to bake my own bread, and how to use what’s in season in my village instead of driving down the road to the supermarket.  The only “staples” that are always available in my local shop are: flour, sugar, onions, tomatoes, eggs (hit or miss—if I go to the shop early enough, they’re still there), white rice, chicken stock cubes, peanut butter (hallelujah!) and ketchup. 

Luckily, I live only about a 45-minute taxi ride outside of the capital city, Maseru, so I’ve got access to a lot of “good food” that other volunteers miss out on.  When I’m in town, I usually stock up on cheese, soy milk and cereal, granola, lots of vegetables, whole wheat pasta, instant sauces, and canned chicken.  You’d be surprised as to what kinds of food can be left out of a refrigerator and still eaten a few days later.  Cheese lasts for about a week and milk for three to four days.  I haven’t gone so far as to buy yogurt and eat it after a few days.  I’m not that daring.  

When we first arrived in Lesotho, the Peace Corps provided us with a volunteer-compiled cookbook called “Where There Is No Chef”.  I’ve made it my goal to cook through the entire cookbook during these two years of service.  I’ve found a few great “homemade” recipes that I would have never imagined to use before Peace Corps.  For example—tortilla chips!  I make them all the time.  They are so much better homemade than store bought. 

I’ve also become quite the baker.  I love baking my own bread.  I learned from my host family during training how to measure out the perfect ratios of flour to sugar to salt (using my palm, of course), blend it together, sprinkle in a bit of yeast and water, and let it rise in the sun for a few hours.  Nothing beats the smell and the warmth that freshly baked bread brings to my tiny hut in the middle of winter.

Besides enjoying cooking as it is, I also cook a lot because I’m not the biggest fan of the food in Lesotho.  The staple meal (and it is indeed a staple meal; they eat it for every meal) is called papa and moroho.  Papa is thick maize meal, so thick that you break it in chunks and eat it with your fingers.  Moroho is chopped spinach (or, really, any green leaves that grow in the yard), fried in lots of oil and doused in salt.  Sometimes, onions are thrown into the mix.  It’s not unbearably bad, but it’s not healthy for you, either.  And eating papa and moroho every day, all day is exasperating.

Many people here ask me about our staple food in America.  It’s hard to answer, because I don’t think we have a staple food like papa and moroho.  We eat everything.  Maybe some would say that fast food in general is America’s Staple Food.  But that’s hard to explain to a Basotho who has never been to a drive-thru.

I usually answer by explaining that America has lots of different people, so we eat lots of different foods.  We eat Chinese food, Mexican food, Italian food… even that answer goes over their heads.  They expect us to have one “go-to” food.  I was talking to a friend the other day about how we eat different things because we like variety; we get bored with the “papa and moroho”-type meals day after day.  He said that he would like all kinds of food too, if he had the money to do so. 

Today it’s cold and windy, and I’ve been in bed all morning reading Anthony Bourdain’s “A Cook’s Tour (maybe that’s why I was inspired to write about food J).  I’m planning on checking off Frijoles Borrachos from the cookbook.  I think I might have to make some warm tortillas on the side, too.

Flour Tortillas

2 cups flour (not self-raising)

1 ½ tbsp. sugar

½ tsp. salt

2 tbsp. butter

Hot water

Mix all ingredients, using just enough water to stick together.  Knead; should be play-dough consistency.  Divide into small balls and let sit 20 minutes.  Roll each ball into a circle on a floured board.  Cook on an ungreased skillet until lightly flecked with brown spots.

For tortilla chips: cut the tortillas into slices and fry in a little bit of oil until golden.  While still hot, sprinkle with salt.