DATE: November 25, 2007
Photos:
Malawi
For a dollar a day, you can feed a starving climber in Africa. Cooking on BiRT is always interesting, not only due to the low food budget (50p a day!), but also in the tools we use - an open fire with huge cookpots and pans. Once, when we had engine trouble, we camped in someone's back garden and we still roared up a fire for dinner. Needless to say, we tend to get pretty creative with cook duties.
Matt demonstrating how to cook
Each person is assigned a cook partner on joining the trip, and the two must hit markets and shops together to purchase the goods for two days of meals with the pittance handed to us by the trip leader. Amazingly, it is enough. Breakfast usually consists of porridge, but occasionally we get the odd treat of eggy bread (French Toast) or pancakes. Each Hot Rocker is responsible for his or her own lunch. Dinners vary a bit more, but usually start with a base of pasta, rice, or potatos topped with a tomato-based sauce or a bean/lentil stew of some sort. For a treat, we get either cans of tuna or corned beef chucked in the mix. If people REALLY splurge, adding some of their own money to the cook pot, we get some real meat in the mix - with a veggie portion separated for the non meat eaters. I never realised how much I like meat.
After months of this kind of food, Thanksgiving was looming on the horizon and I thought, hey, why not embark on a new sort of cooking adventure? I summoned the only other American on BiRT, Duane, for help and he was all for it. Let's cook Thanksgiving over an open fire in Africa. We were in Malawi, on the edge of a gingantic freshwater lake of the same name. It was hot.
Sunset on Lake Malawi
Getting the ingredients was the first hurdle to overcome. We sketched out a rough menu and set about seeing what we could find. Pumpkin? Corn? Apples? TURKEY??? Having some trouble, we decided to hire the services of a local as our "personal shopper" to lend a hand and see what he could find through local contacts. We gave him a huge list of stuff, paying for most of it in advance and also continuing to look ourselves. Of course, he didn't find much and we didn't ask for the money back - he did after all kill and pluck a couple of ducks for us, but decided to forgo the fat tip we had planned to give him. ;)
There were no apples but there were mangos galore, no corn but maize, no celery but some random vegetable that looked an awful lot like a leafy version of celery and was in fact rather tasty, no turkey but there was duck and lamb, and finally and most sadly... no pumpkin. Or so we thought. Duane noticed there was pumpkin soup on the menu in the bar at our campsite. We had been searching for pumpkin for days to no avail - apparently it had been around at some point but was now out of season. D'oh! But how could they make pumpkin soup? We kept asking, but no one answered - most frustratingly even our hired shopper wouldn't budge on this one. Finally, I hunted down the man who cooked the soup himself. "How do you make your pumpkin soup?" He looked at me, head tilted to the side, and answered "For how many people?" "No no no, I just want to know HOW you make it?" "But for how many people?" Oh my God. I had to work to explain to him that I didn't really want the soup, but the ingredients for his soup. Finally, I managed to buy what was certainly the very last pumpkin in Malawi. :) Pumpkin soup was erased from the menu, and we had a lovely pumpkin pie.
We chopped and mixed under a thatch roof and cooked over an open fire and in a pizza kitchen, using a wood-fired pizza oven as our only means of baking. I'll mention again: it was HOT. And humid. While the other Hot Rockers splashed around in the lake and even held the Hot Rock Olympics, which included such notable events as a judged dance routine, volleyball, and dwarf tossing, we stirred and fried and baked in the heat. We woke around 5am to begin cooking and were hovering in and around fire from about 8am until about 6pm, baking pies and roasting meat with no temperature control whatsoever. Somehow, miraculously, it all came together. I dare say it was one of the better Thanksgiving meals I've had the pleasure of putting together, although this could have also been due to the impossibility of the task to begin with and the comparison of the meals we'd been having until that point.
Duane cooking with Matt hovering for scraps
Duane and I judging a dance routine, Steve dancing
Photo taken by Mike
The spread included: two roast ducks (freshly killed and plucked that day by our hired shopper), a leg of lamb, stuffing, corn pudding (I had miraculously found cans of creamed corn weeks before in a supermarket), salad, mashed potatos, two mango pies, one pumpkin pie, and a flan. People got so stuffed that some actually passed out at the table; one didn't even get to dessert, having fallen asleep in his chair. The thing I was most worried about was that someone would get sick from either something we made or just having eaten too much rich food, which we weren't used to. Luckily, none of our invitees did, but unfortunately one of the cooks (Duane) ended up having a loooong night.
The next morning, we had more pies and pudding for breakfast, the dishes were wiped clean and the legend of Thanksgiving in Malawi was cemented into the history of BiRT.
Duane hanging out at (read the sign) McDonalds "Probably the Best Chips in Cape McLear"