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 typical Hot Rock cook duty (Spitzkoppe, Namibia)

Each person is assigned a cook partner on joining the trip, and the two must hit markets and shops together to purchase goods for two days’ worth of breakfasts and dinners with the pittance handed to us by the trip leader. If there are 15 people on the truck, you are given $30 to feed 15 people, for two days. Amazingly, in Africa it is just 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. Those with higher personal budgets can splurge a bit on lunch food. 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 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 gigantic freshwater lake of the same name. It was hot.

Lake Malawi at sunset

Lake Malawi

Getting the right 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? Hah, unlikely! Having some trouble determining what was and was not possible, 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 shopping list, paying for most of it in advance, while 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.

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 duck and lamb, and finally and most sadly… no pumpkin. Or so we thought.

We had been searching for pumpkin for days to no avail, when Duane noticed there was pumpkin soup on the menu in the bar at our campsite. Apparently it had been around at some point but was now out of season. D’oh! But how could they make the 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 literally erased from the restaurant menu, and we had ourselves a lovely pumpkin pie.

In the heat, David chopping, Duane frying

We chopped and mixed under a thatch roof and cooked over both an open fire outside and in the campground’s wood-fired pizza oven, our only means of baking. We were lucky to have it, or it would have been a stir-fry-only Thanksgiving. I’ll mention again: it was hot. And humid. While the other Hot Rockers splashed around in the lake and played games, holding the first-ever 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 stifling heat.

Steve's Hot Rock Olympics dance-routine outfit

A Hot Rock Olympics judged dance routine. From left: Jase, Juliet, Mike, Joe

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 to the meals we’d been having until that point.

Hot Rock Thanksgiving in Malawi

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. We had no measuring utensils and few actual recipes, but it amazingly turned out well! 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 and butter, which we weren’t used to. Luckily, none of our “guests” 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.

David eating mango pie for breakfast

I am definitely going to have to try and make mango pie again someday. It was the bomb.