This month our cooking arrangements are a little different than they have been the past 3 months… a good different. Let me introduce you to chef Lucas. He is the cutest man you will ever meet. I’m pretty sure he has the sunshine on a string and brings it with him everywhere he goes. Chef Lucas is serious about his faith, an usher at church, a dad, and our cook.
Steph and I have been in charge with helping make the menu and go shopping with chef for groceries. We always have fun going down to the market, tasting all of the oranges to find the best variety and getting fresh fruits and vegetables and then stocking up on other groceries at the supermarket. On our journeys chef always gets great joy in telling us that people are greeting us in another language thinking that we can understand them. He loves telling us how much the children love seeing us and calling to all their friends to come and greet the muzungoo.
Some of my favorite times in Africa so far have been in the kitchen. Chef is a really good teacher and I have learned the art of making chapatti. We always have lots of laughs in the kitchen while we create delicious meals. Some of the guys from church who come and help out joke about praying about us staying in Busia. They told me that I meet the African standards and would make a good wife for an African because I’m fast in the kitchen and caught on to making chapatti quicker than most! They are quite hilarious!
One of my favorite African meals that chef makes is rice, lentils, cabbage, chapatti and fruit.. usually bananas 🙂 One of the meals that Steph and I created is like fajitas but using chapatti instead of tortilla shells. We made guacamoli- which by the way the avacados are HUGE here- rice, beef and sauteed green peppers and onions and you put it inside the chapatti… MMM! I love taking a chapatti and putting a banana inside it’s almost like dessert 🙂
Sometimes we have chicken and the boys get to help kill it and then have the honors of eating its gizzard, feet, liver and head :S
For breakfast chef sometimes makes pancakes which are more like crapes and mandazi which is an African pastry kind of like a donut.. I like putting jam in mine 🙂
BTW I guess I should tell you what chapatti is after all the talk about it. Chapatti is a mix between a tortilla shell and pita bread. It’s made with flour oil and water and then rolled into circles and fried in a pan. DELISH!
