Cooking up a Storm

Here in Jaipur, I have just finished five days of fabulous cooking school. I will have some recipes to come soon, but in the meantime, eat with your eyes...

Snapshots

I have made it my mission to update this as often as possible. I will be venturing into India soon, but before I do, here are a few good shots from Ethiopia.

In a huge field with thousands of people, this woman sat selling her wares for the holiday in honor of the Baptism of Jesus.

Part of the market in Dire Dawa, in the East of the country.

Traditional meal; chopped meat, half cooked, half raw.

A street in the heart of Harar, in Eastern Ethiopia.

Ethiopian Coffee

Jumping into Murky Waters

I sat on the edge and stared downward, my legs tightly closed together because every person in the water seemed to be attached to the wall, and I didn’t want anyone looking up my swimsuit.

“Its okay,” he said, “I am lifeguard.”

I didn’t know how to explain that my resistance to going into that water had nothing to do with an inability to swim. In fact, I was a good swimmer. I had been a rather slow participant on my local swim team for eight years, beginning at the tender age of four.

But his assumption was valid. The ‘Olympic size pool’, as was advertised, seemed so very empty in comparison to the cordoned off leg in the L-shaped trough. Separated by bars and painted blue instead of green, so that the water shown slightly more clearly, I did not dare venture into the shallow end. It was packed. As in you could not possibly have moved without touching someone. And this was all because no one seemed to know how to swim. A few people ventured into the green, murky depths, but most in the green zone, as I referred to it, clung safely to the edge.

No, my reasons for not entering had nothing to do with my inability to swim. It had everything to do with the fact that it was a swimming pool, and I couldn’t see the bottom. It was murky, almost like lake water, and when I finally entered, the expected leaves, sticks, and hair floated around as I did. I watched people jump off the diving boards. Clearly on a diving team somewhere, one young man did a smooth flip or two off the high board and entered seamlessly. 

Almost all the men wore the exact same swimsuit. Black or dark blue, with two red or yellow lines down the sides, and more along the lines of boxer briefs than board shorts. A few men clearly were in their underwear. I noticed that none of the swimsuits did a particularly good job at hiding their junk. How awkward.

People showered a lot. There were three or four stand-alone showers around the pool, and they were never empty. A trench ran around the pool and collected soapy water as people washed hastily both before and after they swam. People milled about the sides of the enclosure on straw mats, chairs, and blankets, and most looked like they were there for the day. I guess you had to be, when this place was basically out in the bush (okay, so when you got closer there was a village of sorts, but driving there was literally just open savannah). People licked at ice creams, which despite the lack of the beautiful creaminess of Hagaan Daaz, was refreshing and perfect in its artificiality.

Everybody had fun. When we walked over to the spring, I imagined hot submersion and couldn’t contemplate wanting to get in. Along the way were what seemed hundreds of monkeys, a river wash, and a little tin shack about four feet by four feet that I wondered what could have ever fit in. We finally got there and separated, as one part was for women and one for men.

The scene struck me more like a Moroccan bath, but with running water. Three incredibly hot, crystal clear streams flew out of pipes overhead, and the stairs that led down were concrete, and led into a murky, soapy water about calf height. I was surprised at the heat, and somewhat fascinated by the scene. 

Women surrounded me, many with bare breast, washing themselves and each other, sitting on the concrete ledge across from the stream, using a glove to exfoliate. They stood beneath the hot stream only briefly, and more often put just a bit of their body underneath, or used their hands to splash the water on themselves. My feet turned bright red. Later, Melaku would take a picture and we would laugh at the fact that it looked like I was wearing socks because my feet and lower calves were the color of boiled lobster. Right then, it felt like they were cooking. 

But I moved under the stream. I liked the feel of it pounding on me, and I liked putting my hair underneath and washing my face with it. It felt cleansing. I had been told that people believed that the spring this came from was considered holy, and that Ethiopians traveled from all around to bathe in the water and heal themselves. Even as I looked, a mother sat on the stairs with a limp child in her arms. Maybe he was sleeping, but as I stared at him, something about the lack of expression, the open mouth, the stillness as his mother brushed water tenderly over his face, made me think he was very ill. Or maybe it was just my preconception. 

I chatted with a girl in a lime green polka-dotted bikini and found out she had lived in Las Vegas. Random. I stuck my head under the rush a few times, lathered up, washed, and generally enjoyed the fascinating scene around me.

When I left I was in a good mood. A few coffees later, and one crazy ride in a truck that had been offered to us for free, I sat contentedly and watched men eat raw beef chunks, that specialty of Ethiopia that I could hardly bring myself to look at, let alone stick in my mouth. And then we were on the bus, watching the hills roll by, the huts get smaller and less permanent, and the sun disappear behind mountains and trees with flat looking heads. 

I didn’t know what the rest of this journey would bring for me. But I knew with crystal clarity as I rode the bus and watched the world fly by that somehow here, the unfamiliar had become simply normal to me. Each scene before my eyes was a postcard, or some brochure cover I would’ve drooled at back home, but now everything felt strikingly normal.

And I knew it wasn’t because the sights before me weren't spectacular. It had nothing to do with the fact that this postcard wasn’t fascinating. I felt the true spirit of travel flow through me in the realization that it was simply that my world now was full of the unfamiliar, and so it became comfortable. Or maybe not comfortable, but familiar. In fact I often was incredibly familiar with being uncomfortable. 

I often find that I critique my entire process, and that I have very high expectations about how I should travel to be good at it. I have a clear image in my mind of what I think a ‘good’ traveler is, and since I've always thought that this must be my ‘thing’ (what else would it be?), I hate when I don’t live up to that ideal. It makes me feel like I'm not as good at this as I seem to think, like maybe I can't actually handle the world around me as well as I've always thought. But as I watch the sun go down over open desert and rounded huts, I know that this is what it means to truly be a traveler; it doesn’t mean perfection. It doesn’t mean that I never desire a Starbucks coffee, or a nice comfortable bed in a hotel room with running hot water and wifi. It doesn’t mean that I don’t have the occasional harsh judgment of the craziness around me. It means that I come through it; I get back on the bus, and ride by to watch the sun set in familiar, chaotic calm. 

When Marbles Fell out of my Head: Hyena Feeding in Harar

I was glancing around surreptitiously in the dark. The street lights only worked for about a block, and so I was carefully allowing my eyes to adjust to the dimness. Pavement melded into dirt roads, but the shops remained the same. Blue, red, green, white, and yellow paint, often done half way up the side and then white the rest of the way, they were all made of mud, I thought. And light flooded from inside.

Some were just a small window of what seemed an even smaller shop, so itsy bitsy that it seemed impossible that anybody would even fit inside. Some were stores, clothes shops with sewing machines outside and in, and big wooden flat counters in front. One had a pool table with wheels where the table legs should be, so that it looked like a racecar. Women sat on the sides of the road with tarps and sheets displaying fruit, vegetables, and nuts.

Nobody else seemed to be furtively glancing around for them. I walked through a sort of archway and into more blackness, although this seemed deeper, more intense. The numbers of people thinned, and I saw lights ahead of a parked car. But it drove past, and then the darkness came again.

There was another of the little shops made of mud, miniscule, in front of a house with a dim light, and across the way I saw a dumpster and a house with a fire outside. I heard a baby cry. And they were there.
A group of men, a soldier, and them, lying about, so close. Lying about as if they were not wild, as if they were merely pets taking a quick nap. I glanced back at the dumpster and saw a head peek out comically.

Don’t be afraid, I was told, they are like dogs. The things were not much bigger than dogs, although one seemed massive. And at first I found them sort of ugly, especially when they bared their teeth, which I noticed was more an expression than an aggressive gesture. They were spotted, had rounded ears that stood up, and they didn’t look like dogs.

When they wandered close, I carefully stepped back. I didn’t want them anywhere near me, really. They were scary, like lions or something, and they were not to be around. But there wasn’t enough light. I wanted to see and go, to get away from them, but there wasn’t enough light and we needed to wait for it.


The man in the red shirt placed an old plastic straw sack for flour on the ground and encouraged me to sit. They were creeping closer to him, and somehow it seemed so much safer to stand. But sit I did. And they came closer to us, and I couldn’t handle it. He wrapped an arm around me and pulled me against him as I crouched into a ball, then put my hand against my face to shield it as I felt one of them come against my side (I found out from a picture later that he was dangling meat over my shoulder). I screamed. I asked him to get them away from me. I cried a little.

I stood up and felt like I was gasping for air. There was one singular rod of neon light in the corner, and we moved closer to it, into their territory. The man laid the sack back down, and he put a stick in his mouth, draped it with meat, and I watched powerful jaws clench and teeth remove it. He held a straw basket where he fished out more meat, hand fed them, and then laid down and let them bury their heads in the basket. He laughed loudly, maniacally, and put the basket between his knees. I was reminded of ‘laughing hyenas,’ of the Lion King and the hyena servants to the evil lion master. He petted them. He showed no fear.


By the time I plucked up the courage to kneel again on that bag, there were two giant busloads of Ethiopian students from Addis Ababa to watch, and their bus lights lit the scene so much better. I felt like a spectacle.

But I breathed. I was getting a really cool experience. And it was fun for them, to watch the white girl squirm, though I noticed they shrieked and moved away too whenever the hyenas came near them. So I kneeled. And although I closed my eyes a bit (one stepped on my foot), I managed to stay mostly still as he waved meat over my shoulder and it ate.

And then we watched again as the man in the red shirt threw caution to the wind. Ethiopian students began to go kneel next to him, taking a stick into their mouth and letting him drape meat over it. Some of the bites seemed to get sort of close, but everyone came out unscathed. It became an attraction, like a crazed version of people bolting for a turn on a mechanical bull at a drunken college party. As soon as someone had fed it, stood up, and moved, another was in place to try.

I finally plucked up the courage. When, when on Earth was I going to be back somewhere where I could feed a hyena, mouth to mouth? Shouldn’t I take advantage of this opportunity, fear be damned? I decided this was not the time to actually think things through, like consequences. Or to consider the fact that with one little snap, I could be a much larger treat.

I hoped the stick he gave me would be long, but no number of inches (I was guessing mine was about four to six inches) erased the fact that I was nose to nose, eye to eye, and mouth to mouth with a wild hyena. I squeezed my eyes shut. I couldn’t help it! The photograph of me feeding it is hilarious. I look like I'm in pain, but I stood and laughed. I shook slightly as we walked away, no longer glancing around for strays.

If I were to make a list of the craziest things I've done in my life, this would be on it. I don’t know what propelled me to think it was a good idea. I’ve started a list entitled “marbles that fell out of my head” to document such occasions that seem so incredibly ludicrous now that my marbles have returned to me. I hope the list continues beyond the confines of this trip, and into a life full of moments where I forget the realities of this world, and take a leap of faith into the clutches of big, furry chances.

Injera Making

 INJERA MAKING

Sorry it's been so long. This web page would literally not open in the entire country of Ethiopia. How odd! Anyway, over the next week or so I will be posting about some of the things I learned, saw, and experienced in Ethiopia. For now, here is a video showing how to make injera. Injera, like bread ('khobs') in Morocco or rice in South India, is the staple in Ethiopia, and no meal would be complete without it. Most of the time, it is presented on a plate or platter and the food is poured on top, and everyone eats from the single plate. It is also common to roll it, cut it into thirds, and allow each person to choose their own, spread it out on their plate, and use it to eat. Ethiopians use this spongy pancake as their utensil, and I've heard even sometimes as a plate!

Injera has a very distinct flavor and smell. It is unlike most staples in that it is not a neutral flavor. Prepared simply with 'ttef flour, water, and homemade yeast, injera is mixed in mass (usually in a bucket) and sealed, then aged for three days. As it ferments, it becomes more liquidated, and the result is a watery liquid dough that is poured from a gourd (or now, sometimes just a cup or more widely manufactured device) onto the hot 'mettat', or injera maker. This large pan is generally powered by electricity or wood fire, and is often the only cooking device in the kitchen apart from a single kerosene burner. And everyone has one.

Many of the patterns of pouring are quite beautiful, and the injera begins to bubble almost immediately. It is then removed with a large, round straw mat, and placed into a straw basket designed to hold injera. The taste is definitely acquired for the foreigner; while I enjoyed most Ethiopian food, this was one thing I couldn't get use to. Sour, spongy, and often soggy from delicious sauces, injera may be unusual, but it is an irreplacable part of any Ethiopian experience, and any meal.

Here is the video of injera making. We made about fifteen or twenty of these at once!

 

And after its cooked, about three to five minutes.

More Food from Egypt!

This dessert was like nothing I had ever had. It was from an adorable little restaurant with no menu across from the Colossi d Memnon on the West Bank of Luxor. The sauce was a hibiscus honey, and chocolate covered peanuts were featured on this wholly edible plate (all the garnishes were edible).

This tajin was from a restaurant in Luxor that was actually quite dirty, but by the time we got there we just needed to eat! This had lots of fresh vegetables and chicken inside, and a thick sauce.

The quintessential Egypt picture. 

Brief Schedule and Egyptian Food

Hello Again!
Here is my tentative schedule for the next four to five months. I recognize that it is very vague; its because I have much less firm plans this time.

January 12- February 8: Ethiopia
February 8- March 8: Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Zambia
March 8- April 3: Delhi, Jaipur, and Agra, India
April 3-? Thailand

I am currently in Cairo, Egypt. Here is some of the food I have had in Egypt:

 A Meza Platter

 The man at this restaurant simply put the food in front of us, and it had little to do with what we had actually ordered. It was all delicious though!

 An interesting salad of amazingly fresh tomatoes, fried eggplant, fried bread, dill, and parsley. Really good.

More to come!