These are the further adventures of Dan Jones and Helen Trenchard, on their 12 month mission to boldly go where they'd not been before...KENYA!
Wednesday 20 June 2012
Q: What will you miss most?
A: Our good Kenyan friends, chapatti, walking over the railway bridge, the friendliness of everyone. Learning Swahili with Lucy and Nick, going on adventures all the time, giraffes. Work-life balance. The monkeys who stole the sugar bowl from my office. A country where a cold day is almost the same temperature as a warm day in the UK. Rides on the back of pikis (motorbikes). Meeting new people constantly, and making friends with people we probably wouldn’t even meet back home. Elephants. Cute children tugging at my beard, people taking the time to find out how you are, wandering round South B. Huge, ripe avocadoes right outside my door for 20 bob (15p). Spending so much time with my loved one. Never having to wait for a bus (there’s no schedule, but there’s always one there). A big apartment. Strolling round Nairobi city centre on a Sunday. Feeling ‘light’ – few possessions, little need to buy things, no real obligations, freedom to do whatever. The support of fellow VSOs, the eagerness of people like us in a strange land to make friends and share experiences. Safaris, coconut beaches, Splendid Starlings, colourful fish, Kenyan pride, cooking on gas. Tusker beer, choma, Kenyans dancing at every opportunity, mangos.
Tuesday 19 June 2012
Q: What are you most looking forward to?
A: European food and drink, seeing our friends and their children after a
year away, being able to drive around in a car, having a
fridge, living somewhere quieter. Roads, buses and trains that are more
predictable and more comfortable, beautiful architecture, clean air, wonderful gardens, public spaces that are safe and pleasant. Not
being stared at or shouted at, just being ignored, feeling ‘at home’. Pavements
and drains, baths, walking around at night, generally having more freedom to go
where and when I like, having a 'right to roam' - taking a walk in the countryside. Seeing VSO friends
already back in the UK, carpets, drinking water out the tap, working in an
environment I fully understand, autumn leaves.
Sunday 17 June 2012
How to make Kenyan chapati
Posted by: Helen
A little sugar
A lot of vegetable cooking oil
1. Put all the flour in a big bowl. Mix ½ teaspoon of salt and 3 teaspoons of sugar in a cup of warm water, and add to the flour. Add 50g vegetable oil, plus another cup of warm water with nothing added. Mix it all up with your hands so the dough takes in all the flour. Be careful not to make it too sticky (add flour) or too flaky (add water).
2. Roll the dough out flat with a rolling pin or wine bottle, but not too thin. Use more flour to stop everything sticking together. Pour another tablespoon of oil over this chunky pancake and smooth it all over the top.
3. Cut the flattened dough into strips about 5cms wide. Wind each strip into a tight roll, pulling the ‘tail’ of each strip and pushing it into the centre of each roll, making a dimple. This keeps it all tightly wound. Each rolled up dough ball should be the size of a child’s fist.
4. Get your chapati pan ready. This could be the purpose-made, flat heavy iron pan, or a normal frying pan. The pan should NOT be non-stick, as the coating can be removed during cooking. Any thick-bottomed shallow pan that will really hold the heat should work, remembering that to be doing it Kenyan-style, you'll be using your hands to turn the chapati. Put a little oil in your pan with a tablespoon and give it a medium to high heat to prepare for shallow frying.
5. While your pan is heating up, roll your first dough roll into a chapati. ‘Not too thick, and not too thin’. It should be the size of a man’s outstretched hand. Jack rolled his dough into a perfect circle. Our first attempts looked more like the shape of Kenya (!) but practice makes perfect. Whatever the shape, you’re ready to fry.
6. When your pan is very hot, carefully place the flatten chapati dough onto the oiled pan and rotate it smartly with your outstretched fingers (careful!). After less than a minute you’ll see the cooked colour emerging through from the other side.
7. Flip it with the tablespoon and your hand and completely coat the just-fried side with (more!) oil using your spoon. Flip after a short time to do the same with the second just-fried side. The chapati will bubble up and brown in patches so keep smoothing it down with the back of the spoon.
8. When there are dark brown patches on both sides and you’ve flipped it 3 or 4 times your chapati is cooked. Each one should take less than 3 minutes to fry in the pan.
9. To conserve your fuel, and have more fun, ask a friend roll out the next dough ball while you’re cooking and switch duties once yours is cooked.
10. After 5 or 6 chapatis have been fried, dark flour residue in the pan can make chapatis look cooked before they are, so wipe the pan with a cloth and re-oil it.
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| This blog post is dedicated to Phil Borge who dared me to plunge into a Kenyan kitchen and emerge, recipe aloft, to tell the tale and share the joy. |
The humble and glorious chapati. A mainstay of East African culture and an essential part of any Kenyan feast. This blog post is written in praise and glory of the chapati, and shows you how to make them Kenya-style.
For those of you wondering why an Indian food came to be so important in East Africa, look no further than the British. Kenya’s colonial masters chose to build a railway connecting the East African interior (Uganda) with the Kenyan port of Mombasa for trade, access and…. well just because we could, really.
Dubbed ‘The Lunatic Line’ by Victorian commentator Henry Labouchere, it once spanned the region like a clanking iron snake, and still exists as ‘one of the world’s best train journeys’ even if the now much reduced network is in desperate disrepair. At time of writing the line is closed for maintenance work, although we were lucky enough to travel the Nairobi-Mombasa overnight journey three times last year (and escape with our lives). We found it to be an oddly charming colonial relic, complete with bunks, a dining car and frightening toilets.
Between 1896 and 1901, 38,000 Indian labourers were shipped over to Kenya to build the railway. It seems that local Kenyan workers were...'reluctant' to provide slave labour for this nutty British project. Instead, the railway was built by the Queen’s subjects from India. 6,000 of these railway workers who had survived the conditions, the diseases and Tsavo's man-eating lions stayed on and made a permanent home here. Kenya's Asian population contributes massively to Kenya's culture and (particularly) the economy to the present day. One of those contributions is our humble and delicious chapati.
Preferring their chapati’s heavy, thick and made with a lot of oil (and who wouldn’t?) Kenyans soon moved away from the thinner, healthier, Indian chapati and created their own. Always made for special occasions, ‘chapati’ or ‘chappo’ is the answer when asking most Kenyans about their favourite food. Many Kenyan friends and colleagues have happy memories working together in the kitchen with mother and siblings to make the dish. Dan and I eat many every week as they are just so tasty in a country where many of the staple foods don’t rock our boats.
Sold on street stalls all over Kenya, the Professional Chapati Makers (do they have a name?) have two (or more) pans on the go at once; they are hunched over, spinning one with each hand like a DJ at a turntable, and rolling out more dough with every spare second. This is all very impressive, because making one at a time was tricky enough…
Dan and I spent a recent evening in the lovely home of pals Kristen and Jack. We were there for our chapati lesson with Jack, and super fun it was too. We learned why personal trainer Jack often starts conversations about weight loss with clients by determining their ‘chapati intake’, by discovering exactly how much oil goes into Kenyan chapati. This, people, is why they taste so good. Big thanks to Kristen and Jack for such a fun time, and special thanks to Chef Sukura for his patient guidance, and sharing his mother's precious recipe with us all. You guys rock.
Between 1896 and 1901, 38,000 Indian labourers were shipped over to Kenya to build the railway. It seems that local Kenyan workers were...'reluctant' to provide slave labour for this nutty British project. Instead, the railway was built by the Queen’s subjects from India. 6,000 of these railway workers who had survived the conditions, the diseases and Tsavo's man-eating lions stayed on and made a permanent home here. Kenya's Asian population contributes massively to Kenya's culture and (particularly) the economy to the present day. One of those contributions is our humble and delicious chapati.
Preferring their chapati’s heavy, thick and made with a lot of oil (and who wouldn’t?) Kenyans soon moved away from the thinner, healthier, Indian chapati and created their own. Always made for special occasions, ‘chapati’ or ‘chappo’ is the answer when asking most Kenyans about their favourite food. Many Kenyan friends and colleagues have happy memories working together in the kitchen with mother and siblings to make the dish. Dan and I eat many every week as they are just so tasty in a country where many of the staple foods don’t rock our boats.
Sold on street stalls all over Kenya, the Professional Chapati Makers (do they have a name?) have two (or more) pans on the go at once; they are hunched over, spinning one with each hand like a DJ at a turntable, and rolling out more dough with every spare second. This is all very impressive, because making one at a time was tricky enough…
Dan and I spent a recent evening in the lovely home of pals Kristen and Jack. We were there for our chapati lesson with Jack, and super fun it was too. We learned why personal trainer Jack often starts conversations about weight loss with clients by determining their ‘chapati intake’, by discovering exactly how much oil goes into Kenyan chapati. This, people, is why they taste so good. Big thanks to Kristen and Jack for such a fun time, and special thanks to Chef Sukura for his patient guidance, and sharing his mother's precious recipe with us all. You guys rock.
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| Dinner at Kristen and Jack's = good times. |
Roll up your sleeves, and let’s get started. We’re making chapati for four people.
Ingredients
500g plain flour
2 cups of warm water
A little salt2 cups of warm water
A little sugar
A lot of vegetable cooking oil
Method
1. Put all the flour in a big bowl. Mix ½ teaspoon of salt and 3 teaspoons of sugar in a cup of warm water, and add to the flour. Add 50g vegetable oil, plus another cup of warm water with nothing added. Mix it all up with your hands so the dough takes in all the flour. Be careful not to make it too sticky (add flour) or too flaky (add water).
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| Dan gets stuck in |
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| LOTS of oil |
 |
| Give it a mix |
2. Roll the dough out flat with a rolling pin or wine bottle, but not too thin. Use more flour to stop everything sticking together. Pour another tablespoon of oil over this chunky pancake and smooth it all over the top.
 |
| Roll it out |
 |
| More oil |
 |
| Cutting into strips |
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| Tight little rolls |
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| Nine chapatis, ready to be born |
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| Jack shows us the chapati pan |
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| Spinning the chapati |
7. Flip it with the tablespoon and your hand and completely coat the just-fried side with (more!) oil using your spoon. Flip after a short time to do the same with the second just-fried side. The chapati will bubble up and brown in patches so keep smoothing it down with the back of the spoon.
 |
| Smoothing on the oil |
8. When there are dark brown patches on both sides and you’ve flipped it 3 or 4 times your chapati is cooked. Each one should take less than 3 minutes to fry in the pan.
9. To conserve your fuel, and have more fun, ask a friend roll out the next dough ball while you’re cooking and switch duties once yours is cooked.
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| Keep cooked chapatis covered until you’re ready to eat |
11. Cut into friendly quarters and arrange on a dish. Serve with your favourite meat stew, vegetable dish or fish if you're feeling coastal.
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| Ta-daaa! All ready |
We had our chapattis with Kenyan favourite Ndengu, which are green grams (like lentils) cooked with grated carrot, peppers, skinned tomatoes and coriander. Thanks Kristen. You can even add coriander and grated carrot to the dough to make seriously tasty chapattis. We’ll try that next time.
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| Kristen's homemade ndengu. The perfect partner for our chapatis. |
Thursday 14 June 2012
Carry on camping...in a volcano
Posted by: Dan
Finally! A chance to go camping! After 11 long months of not sleeping in a tent, a brief but brilliantly memorable trip to Mount Suswa was the perfect anecdote. Here’s a brief but brilliant blog post in memory of my favourite volcano.
Suswa, a not-so-long-dormant volcano in the great rift valley (it is believed to have erupted less than two hundred years ago), first got on our radars thanks to a recommendation from fellow volunteer Aurelia. She and her fiancée Tom loved this magical place so much that they went back numerous times, created a website for the local Maasai guide, and even got engaged there. They raved about the boiling hot steam vents, the verdant green slopes, and the astonishing lava caves filled with baboons and bats. We were sold.
Probably my favourite thing about Mount Suswa was that it felt like a real Adventure. It was, quite literally, well off the beaten track. In fact, without our friends and fellow adventurers Marc and Veronica – and their lovely 4x4 landrover – we couldn’t have done it (thanks guys!).
We met our charming and excellently-named Maasai guide Daniel in the small town of Maai Mahiu, where he jumped in and guided us as we drove off-road for hours up the increasingly rocky and decreasingly road-like slopes of Suswa. Marc proved his ability to stay calm despite the bangs, groans and protests coming from his car, as we drove up over not-so-old lava flows and into the outer crater.
Suswa has a unique double crater structure. Astonishingly, in this most remote of places, a community thrives. The plateau between the outer and inner craters is the home of Maasai, and the fertile land is dotted with manyattas (homesteads), crop fields and volcanic steam vents which the people have learned to channel into water storage tanks for domestic use.
We drove on, finally reaching the very edge of the inner crater, where we parked up, put up tents, and gazed out over the sacred “lost island” of lush forest (filled with leopards – and possibly dinosaurs) that occupies the moat-like inner crater. And we looked upwards at the dramatic peak of Suswa looking down on us from amongst the clouds. Breathtaking.
What followed was 24 hours of exploration, caves, bat crap, hiking, toasting marshmallows, snuggling in our tents, dodging black mambas, and proudly reaching the 2,356-meter summit of the mountain.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so instead of writing a thousand words (I could easily, I’m being very disciplined right now) – here’s some more of my favourite pictures from our mini adventure….
(just click play)
As Daniel the Maasai proudly told us, Suswa's baboons and bat caves have featured (along with the Maasai themselves) in a BBC Documentary “The Great Rift”. You can see a short clip on the BBC website here, or settle down to watch the whole awesome episode on Youtube here. I know my wildlife-loving brother is quite jealous right now - sorry Mike!
With thanks:
To Aurelia for the recommendation.
To Trixie for the tent.
To Veronica and Marc for being great company, and to Marc especially for his steely nerve and daring driving.
And to Daniel, for being such a warm host and knowledgeable guide. If you’re in Kenya or planning a visit, we urge you to get in touch with him for a truly memorable adventure. His website is danielmountsuswa.wordpress.com.
Finally! A chance to go camping! After 11 long months of not sleeping in a tent, a brief but brilliantly memorable trip to Mount Suswa was the perfect anecdote. Here’s a brief but brilliant blog post in memory of my favourite volcano.
Suswa, a not-so-long-dormant volcano in the great rift valley (it is believed to have erupted less than two hundred years ago), first got on our radars thanks to a recommendation from fellow volunteer Aurelia. She and her fiancée Tom loved this magical place so much that they went back numerous times, created a website for the local Maasai guide, and even got engaged there. They raved about the boiling hot steam vents, the verdant green slopes, and the astonishing lava caves filled with baboons and bats. We were sold.
Probably my favourite thing about Mount Suswa was that it felt like a real Adventure. It was, quite literally, well off the beaten track. In fact, without our friends and fellow adventurers Marc and Veronica – and their lovely 4x4 landrover – we couldn’t have done it (thanks guys!).
 |
| Daniel the Maasai |
Suswa has a unique double crater structure. Astonishingly, in this most remote of places, a community thrives. The plateau between the outer and inner craters is the home of Maasai, and the fertile land is dotted with manyattas (homesteads), crop fields and volcanic steam vents which the people have learned to channel into water storage tanks for domestic use.
 |
| Breathing in the steam |
 |
| Marc examines a water capture 'system' |
We drove on, finally reaching the very edge of the inner crater, where we parked up, put up tents, and gazed out over the sacred “lost island” of lush forest (filled with leopards – and possibly dinosaurs) that occupies the moat-like inner crater. And we looked upwards at the dramatic peak of Suswa looking down on us from amongst the clouds. Breathtaking.
What followed was 24 hours of exploration, caves, bat crap, hiking, toasting marshmallows, snuggling in our tents, dodging black mambas, and proudly reaching the 2,356-meter summit of the mountain.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so instead of writing a thousand words (I could easily, I’m being very disciplined right now) – here’s some more of my favourite pictures from our mini adventure….
(just click play)
As Daniel the Maasai proudly told us, Suswa's baboons and bat caves have featured (along with the Maasai themselves) in a BBC Documentary “The Great Rift”. You can see a short clip on the BBC website here, or settle down to watch the whole awesome episode on Youtube here. I know my wildlife-loving brother is quite jealous right now - sorry Mike!
With thanks:
To Aurelia for the recommendation.
To Trixie for the tent.
To Veronica and Marc for being great company, and to Marc especially for his steely nerve and daring driving.
And to Daniel, for being such a warm host and knowledgeable guide. If you’re in Kenya or planning a visit, we urge you to get in touch with him for a truly memorable adventure. His website is danielmountsuswa.wordpress.com.
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