Food Adventures

This weekend I stayed around Kigali and spent some time at home... in the kitchen. One of my colleagues at the US Embassy has a farm and delivers on the weekends. I ordered a chicken, milk, and eggs to be delivered on Saturday. The milk was creamy and the eggs were big and brown.

The chicken arrived whole with insides and neck included. Embarrassingly, I have never really cut up a whole chicken. I wanted to cut it into pieces rather than roast it whole, in order to make an orange chicken recipe for friends that evening. I would have called my mom (like I usually do) for cooking instructions about which parts to keep and which to toss, but it was 9AM in Kigali and therefore the middle of the night in Indiana. I did the next best thing and googled how to cut a chicken!

Here was the goal picture of pieces of chicken that I needed to end up with. Mine did not exactly look like these, but I did pretty well.

I gave away the gizzard, neck, and back (I know, I could have made soup with it) and later was informed that in the local culture if your husband comes home to eat chicken and the gizzard is "missing" then he becomes suspicious of his wife. Luckily, I didn't have to worry about that and I didn't think my friends would miss the gizzards!

Kimironko is the big market in Kigali where you can buy fruit, vegetables, meat, and fish.
With some help from my housekeeper Scola, each week I have an abundance of fruit from the market ...mini bananas, passion fruit, tree tomatoes, mangos, and papaya.
This makes for delicious fruit salad that I take to work.

Breakfast commonly includes bread and tea with milk and sugar. At the Embassy they offer samosas (fried with meat or vegetables inside), pancakes, and a variety of muffins for breakfast.

Lunch and dinner are often served buffet-style in local restaurants (and as an option for lunch at the Embassy cafeteria). A traditional Rwandese buffet typically includes boiled beans, bananas, sweet potatoes, or cassava. Umutsima (a dish of cassava and corn), isombe (cassava leaves with Eggplant and spinach) and mizuzu (fried plantains), as well as goat or some other meat stew. Avocados are everywhere in Rwanda and are often served as salad with tomatoes and onions. Fish in Rwanda is mostly limited to tilapia and sambazas, so it is a good thing I love both. The fish is mostly raised on farms in Rwanda. Sambazas are little fried fish usually served with a tartar-like dipping sauce and you eat the whole crunchy thing- head and tail included.

There are a number of small grocery stores where I buy other things not offered in the market.

Blue Band margarine/vegetable oil spread. This product scares me a little because it seems to last forever and surely is not very healthy. I use it sparingly and instead use my olive oil spray that I packed in my suitcase!

White rice in a bag

Strawberry jelly in a tin can

Dishwashing soap for dishes, and bleach for washing fruits and vegetables

Orange juice in a boxMilk in a bag (which oddly lasts a really long time, not sure why)