Cooking with Gas

 

Some food always finds its way to the kitchen floor. Thank you!

Cooked bananas, Pakistani rice and 'ratatouille' sauce

Bananas cooked with tomato sauce

Cooking bananas (heavy!)

Non powedered milk cow
 

 

Rwanda Master Chef Champion, Tokyo, 2009 

Lots of cows abound around those hills, but only powdered milk for my morning porridge... I want to know where the powdered cows are...

I’ve been asked by a very special person to write about food on my blog. It is indeed an important part of my daily life, so I will. I would imagine that I am one of the very few households in the area which does not produce the food I am eating everyday... Subsistence farming is vasty prevalent in Rwanda. Most people live from what they grow and are completely dependent on good crops to eat well. This basically means high vulnerability. In the fairly recent past, very poor crops resulting from bad weather have caused famines and starvation on a large scale. For 90% to 95% of the people I come across in the Nyaraguru district, daily life is all about working on the land from morning to evening to extract the food required. One main consequence of this reality there are actually very few places where one can buy food – no supermarket, with pineapples from Guadeloupe, apples from New Zealand, olive oil from Greece, beef from Argentina... I remember reading about the average distance covered by food to travel form the places of production to the average middle class family in California. It was measured in thousands of kilometres. Here in Rwanda, it would be measured in hundreds of metres for the average family.  The ‘Think globally, eat locally’ principle applies here. But for me the only muzungu   around those hills, a man whom spends most of his time at the local school, things work out differently. I have to rely on a fairly complex system of transport and loose network to bring food to my plate every day. Besides bananas(sweet or cooking bananas) most fruit and vegetables come from markets in Muganza or Butare. So I am often dependent on Soeur Josephine to eat. This food has to be delivered by ‘taxi moto’, which adds about 8A$ per delivery.

I have opted for a vegetarian diet when I realised that eating chicken or rabbit implied seeing the animal being brought alive to the house...  No baker, no butcher, no greengrocer. Eggs are easily found from people in the neighbourhood. Rwanda produces excellent coffee, tea and sugar. These items are bought in Butare or Kigali, along with rice, which I eat everyday. The avocado are coming into season and there are a lot of avocado trees around, so Baptiste can easily get hold of some. Not much variety in what I find in my plate everyday – rice everyday (imported from Pakistan – globalization does exist here too occasionally chips or boiled potatoes (with the rice) and a ratatouille-like mixture of whatever vegetable are available. I have been craving for raw vegies, so lately I have asked Baptiste to grate some carrots and cabbage. No dairy product. Red beans are quite common, but I find them hard to digest.

Unfortunately, I find it quite hard to share meals with Baptiste, as we are unable to sustain any conversation and when I try to say something, he always says ‘yes’. I find this frustrating and often I go and eat outside watching the big African tre that has become my friend...