Pushing the weak

The lunch spread in Kamasengre. Note the mound of ugali in the middle of the table, it was record-setting.

At the end of the first day I jotted down what we ate in my notebook. I thought it would be interesting to have a little diary of meals to help remember all the exotic Kenyan foods we were going to try during the trip.

The entry went something like this: fried eggs, toast, coffee and tea. For lunch, at a downtown Nairobi diner, we had chicken curry, rice, ugali and passion fruit juice. And for dinner with Alice and Faybe, at the Vitalis' home, it was ugali, sukuma wiki, a chicken stew and oranges.

Remarkably, that diary wouldn't change much (so I eventually quit writing down what we ate). That's no slight against the Kenyan diet, despite being somewhat basic we really enjoyed what we were served a never walked away from a table hungry. Clearly the cultural staples are important there, and were consistently served whether we ate with poorer rural people or at a city restaurant. We really became hooked on a few of the dishes, so I'll share some of the highlights.

Dan Nyangweso's sukuma wiki field on Rusinga Island.

The first is sukuma wiki, which means, translated from Swahili, "pushing the weak." Sukuma wiki was always on the table for lunch and dinner, and judging from the ease in growing and preparation I can see why. It's sauteed greens, more or less, made from a plant that resembles our swiss chard or kale. The leaves are chopped into thin slices by the handful and cooked in a small amount of oil with some green onions and chopped tomatoes. We had dinner at Dan Nyangweso's home on our last night on Rusinga. While his wife cooked the main dish outside on a fire pit, he, probably uncharacteristically for a man, gave us a cooking demonstration on sukuma wiki and ugali in the living room by lantern. His two-year-old daughter sat there staring at him, until Dan noticed and laughed: 'She doesn't know what to think,' he said, 'she's never seen me do this before.' But judging by the taste, he wasn't out of practice.

That night Dan also made ugali, which must be the national food of Kenya (and regrettably, doesn't show up in a close-up among my photos. Sorry). On one of the first days one man told us he just doesn't feel right if he doesn't have some ugali every day. It's the staple, and it was everywhere. At one of the safari meals, where they serve a cuisine that's more upscale British and didn't have the standard African foods, Timm and I went and asked the Maasai kitchen staff if we could get some ugali to go with dinner. The guy smiled and brought it right out; of course they had some going for themselves in the back.

Ugali is also very simple, coming from a crop that can be seen growing everywhere. You heat some water and slowly mix in maize flour, constantly stirring until it has a porridge-like look. Then the ugali is allowed to set up and hardened a bit, and nearly every host would place it on a plate shaped into a small dome that looks like mashed potatoes. When it's cool it takes on a thicker consistency, so you grab it with the fingers of your right hand and use the ugali almost like a utensil you can eat (which means it trumps rice as a side dish in my book). It's probably a little bland, but incredibly filling and a little addicting.


Chicken, beef, lamb, eggs: These don't change much in the English-Swahili translation, and we had one (or occasionally two) at every meal. It felt a little meat-heavy at times, actually. Fried, stewed, curried, even barbecued one night. Surprisingly, even at Lake Victoria we ate very little fish.

The morning mandazi in the pan at Kamasengre.

Mandazi was more rare than the other foods, but we lucked out a few times. Mandazi is the Kenyan donut, a small bit of fried bread served early in the day. Less sugary than our Dunkin' Donuts style, but eating them fresh out of the frying pan gives mandazi an edge over maple bars. Just ask Timm.

It's not Winchell's, but maybe that's a good thing.

One other special treat was fruit. Kenya is on the equator and is a very agricultural country, so every roadside stand and most backyards had a wide assortment. Bananas are smaller than what we're used to, growing only about 5 inches but tasting considerably sweeter than what our stores sell; oranges are the size of racquetballs rather than our softball-ball sized orbs; and mangos are maybe half the size of the one Timm and I bought at Metropolitan Market yesterday. Our host Vitalis Ojode asked us one night if all American fruit is genetically modified: we said yes, more or less, though there's a real trend toward organic and natural that does away with some of those genetically modified seeds. He said that Kenya will take 'em if we don't want 'em.

Timm picks a guava during a break in our hike on Mfangango Island. Yes, we were in someone's yard, but it was, like we say, "sawa." Guava from the tree, by the way, is wonderful.

The Ojode's backyard banana tree in Runda.

The last, and most important, that I'll cite is tea. Kenyan tea is a big deal. We drove past tea plantations in the Rift Valley with beautiful rowed hedges of emerald green pushes where tea-pickers were trimming the day's harvest. We saw estates where "tea tourists," like wine connoisseurs in Napa Valley, could vacation to sample tea and see it grown and picked. And everywhere we went there was a light blue thermos accompanying the meal, full of either mixed tea or hot milk to steep your own bag British-style. I haven't made ugali in my kitchen yet or used the kale from the backyard for sukuma wiki, but I've had a Kenyan black tea every day since returning.

A Rift Valley tea farm. There's maize in the background as well.