Madam, You are Not Fair!

All in all, passion fruit aside, I wasn't overly impressed with the level of really fun market produce in Uganda, at least until our second to last day. After weeks of markets that pretty much featured cabbage, plantains, sickly tomatoes, and various starchy roots, we visited the main market in Kampala, which was a little more like what I'd hoped. I can't vouch for the local pedigree of all the offerings, but given the state of the roads in East Africa, I'm going to hope that most of it (South African apples aside) hadn't come too far. Plums from Jinja, source of the Nile, bitter melon, spices...after the very limited village diet Liana lives on, it was overwhelming.My eye was caught by a product that I'd just learned was one of Uganda's major exports--vanilla beans. I came back with a fat bag of desiccated pods for about US$5, although I was actually put off buying all I would have wished by some truly dedicated sales techniques. No sooner had I glanced at the beans, than the eager salesman was all over me...initially quoting me a price nearly double what I eventually paid (which was no doubt nearly double the actual going rate). I tried to beg off, after I couldn't get him to a price I wanted, and moved on, but he followed us insistently and we finally agreed to wait at the market edge while he got a bigger bagful. I waswaiting, and suddenly a hand shoved a huge fat worm under my nose. It was a monster bourbon vanilla bean, soft and wet and four times the size of almost any one I had ever seen. Here's where things got hasty, because I looked up to see that the man attempting to sell me the amazing beans (at a better price I might add) wasn't my original man, who had just returned with his bag of beans. I deliberated for a minute, but guy #1 won Liana's soft heart over by his plaintive 'Madam, you are not fair...' and sad face, so I bought his beans and left the market. Next time I would have stuck it out and found all kinds of wonderful things, but this time, I'm pretty happy with my 20-bean haul, enough to play with for the first time. I can't wait to use them for ice cream, pound cakes, custards. Look out for little black seeds everywhere, as I redeem myself for being an overwhelmed white person and not diving deeper in.

The first recipe I had in mind for these beans was from Amanda Hesser's Cooking for Mr. Latte. As I may have mentioned, I have a grudging fascination with this weird little book. The writing, culled from a year of newspaper columns, lacks depth, but the recipes are flawless, and something about the way she writes them up has earned many of them a permanent spot on my mental to-do list. Many of the ones I've made have stayed on the roster simply because they're excellent. At the end of one chapter, my eye was caught by a recipe for vanilla pound cake from Boston's Hi-Rise bakery.

Normally, I wouldn't make or order pound cake, although I like it very much, because it doesn't excite my imagination. When I make plain cake, I usually go for yogurt cake, or just biscuit draped with berries and whipped cream. This recipe, though, seemed like something special, largely because it came with conditions and a particular type of restrained excess. While resolutely simple, just a pure pound cake brushed with syrup, it uses not one, not two, but three kinds of vanilla, and the recipe calls for 'as many vanilla beans as you can afford'. With all my new vanilla on hand, I wanted to feature it, and this recipe just seemed like it would showcase the essence of vanilla.

And it was perfect, down to the crunchy crust flecked with vanilla seeds, so here's the recipe for the next time you find yourself in a crowded market with men showering you with fat, wet vanilla beans.

Vanilla Bean Loaves
Adapted from Hi-Rise Bread Company in Cambridge, MA, via Amanda Hesser

3 sticks unsalted butter, at room temperature
2 1/2 cups vanilla sugar (sugar in which a split vanilla bean has been buried for at least a few days)
1 vanilla bean
1 Tblsp vanilla extract
8 large eggs, room temperature
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

For the syrup:
1 3/4 cups sugar
1 cup water
2 vanilla beans, split and scraped

Thickly butter two loaf pans and preheat oven to 325 farenheit.
Cream the butter and sugar until pale and fluffy.
Scrape the first vanilla bean and get all the seeds into the bowl, along with the vanilla extract.
Add the eggs one by one and beat to combine.

Sift the flour, salt, and baking powder. Add the dry ingredients to the batter and fold in, mixing minimally with a rubber spatula, until just combined.

Divide the batter between the loaf pans. Bake for 30 minutes, then turn the pans and bake another 25-40 minutes or until a cake tester comes out almost clean.

While the loaves bake, make syrup. In a small saucepan, dissolve the sugar in the water over medium heat. Add the vanilla beans and seeds and stir a little to loosen the seeds. Remove pan from heat.

When the loaves are done, cool them for 10 minutes in the pan on a rack, and then turn them out onto the rack. Brush them generously on all sides (bottom too) with the syrup. Repeat the brushing with syrup a few more times as the loaves cool. Amanda Hesser says the cakes can be wrapped and frozen, but as she cautions, it's hard to wait that long.

Everybody Digs

A few more subjective thoughts on the Ugandan food economy.
According to the Bradt guide, a very large percentage (in the high eighties, I think, or more--someone with a Bradt guide?) of the Ugandan population participates in agricultural activity. There are large farms and export crops, but the majority of this activity seems, from unscientific observations out of bus windows and a few conversations, to be subsistance. Almost everyone is growing a substantial proportion of what they are eating. In the words of the deputy headmistress at Liana's school, 'everybody digs.' Digging, the all purpose term for working in the kitchen garden, is largely conducted with small hoes, and is the province of women, children, hired day laborers (usually men).
There are markets, and there are certainly imports (rice, particularly), but the cassava, the plantains, the bananas, the sweet potatoes and 'Irish' potatoes, the maize and beans and greens, most of the fruit, the tomatoes and eggplants, the cabbages...most of this is, if a family is smart, coming from their own plot, or a few others that they rent or own nearby. Even most of what's in the market is coming from no further than a few towns away, (the larger Kampala market excepted). Tea is grown commercially, and widely drunk with spice influenced by and named after Indian chai. Coffee is mostly grown for export--if you ask for it in country, you get instant. Bread is available but terrible, usually stale.

In many ways, it's the locavore's dream--subsistence eating without chemicals. The diet probably relies too heavily on dubiously nutritious starches (plantains, cassava) and fats, and the water isn't always clean, but at least you know where just about everything came from. And it's so matter of fact. That's the part that kept blowing my mind--it wasn't some fad or some back-to-the-landiness, it was just how people were eating.Liana's thinking about going more seriously into farming, maybe getting some chickens, digging a good garden. I'll update on her progress as she sends me pictures, if she does, and in the meantime continue trying to convince her that a: nasturtiums and their leaves are great in salads, and b: that salads are food.

Odds and Ends

Uganda was wonderful, but we couldn't stay forever.It's good to be home, cold and stressful, but good. I missed Matt terribly, and missed my city and my kitchen and my life. Being on vacation, at the mercy of others for food and transport and all the small decisions of the day to day, can be exhausting. I've been too busy and broke since getting home to truly cook at the mad level I had reached before leaving, but I've been enjoying re-acquainting myself with little shared kingdom, cooking simple food, packing my lunch...My local food isn't quite so local, but isn't it beautiful?
What you can't see in the photo above is the joyful sight of Matt helpless with laughter listening to a radio comedian riff on Joe Biden and the mid-Atlantic states in general.
While it looked like this out, I've been making spicy soup, braised chicken with mushrooms, and other warm comfort foods. And of course, what would life be like without a few fun things.
Yogurt cake again...I could eat one every day. This one was a particular success, with local organic cranberries and Chilean chestnut marmalade that Miriam brought back this summer.
These I made on my second night back, inspired by Martha Stewart's cupcake focused February issue. It's the Bart's chocolate coffee cake, my standby, with swiss meringue buttercream. As the year begins in earnest, I really want to make sure that I take care of us through food this year, which means fun things and harder things, like reducing portions and being reasonable with meats. I've always preferred adding foods in (vegetables, whole grains) to taking things out (sugar, chocolate, fruit juice), but I want to be careful in a non-obsessive way, to live well and live long, so this year may see some changes.

When You Tamper with Liana, You Tamper with Hot Soup

I'm back, I'm back, slowly acclimating to cold snowy days and working and sleeping less. I love New York, and am always happy to come home to it, but it was nice to have an interlude somewhere warmer and less intense.

One of the best parts of the trip was visiting Liana's current home and workplace, a crumbly boarding school up a hill from the small village of Bukuumi, near the town of Kakumiro, 30km from the small city of Mubende, Uganda. In other words, it's pretty remote.

Still, Liana has a pretty nice house on campus, which resembles an old summer camp, with large dorms and bats and what not. School wasn't in session when we visited, so it was very quiet, and we just spent a few days sitting around, and of course trying out her kitchen setup.Except for rice, most of what Ugandans eat is grown very locally indeed, if not in your garden than in your neighbor's. Staple foods are maize porridge (posho), cassava, yams and sweet potatoes and 'irish' potatoes, and especially steamed plantain (matoke). With these, people eat beans or thin stews of beef, chicken (a comparative delicacy), and goat. Green vegetables aren't in abundance, although almost everyone is growing cabbage and doodo (doe-Doe), a spinach-like green. Eggplant and tomatoes and carrots are also usually available, along with onions and garlic. Bananas are big, and passion fruits are plentiful, with mangoes, papayas, and pineapple usually available at some point.

Food is pretty standardized, and everyone pretty much eats the same thing as everyone else, every day. Indian influence can be seen in the chapatis sold by street vendors and made at home, usually a little more deep fried and oily than their indian counterparts.

When we cooked at Liana's, we ate simply--biscuits with peanut butter for breakfast, vegetables and rice or pasta (macrons(!)) for dinner. Here I am frying eggplant on Liana's gas stove, which is great (most people cook over little charcoal burners, so it's high end).
Enjoy the shirt I'm wearing, as it vanished shortly thereafter and has not been seen again. Liana's house has a sink and toilet, but no running water anymore, as the school infrastructure is well below what it seems to have once been, and the pond is polluted. She (or more honestly her students) bring water from a borehole down the hill from her house.The twenty-litre jugs are heavy. In case anyone is wondering, as we were, the term jerrycan comes from the Allied force's nickname for the Germans, 'jerries,' who invented them as a war product, the Wehrmachtskanister, before the Second World War. Speaking of powerful armies, Liana says that her headmaster (more on him later), likes to bring her up at staff meetings and talk about how she is doing good work and is backed by a large organization (the Peace Corps), saying 'when you tamper with Liana, you tamper with hot soup.' Hot soup aside, it seems like he's been very supportive of her teaching efforts (biology, 'life skills,' a little reproduction, and a rising amount of computer instruction, should the electricity ever become more reliable), and very interested in the kind of intercultural exchange she can offer the students just by being herself.Liana's kitchen options are somewhat limited, but she and her friends do a lot of cooking, even baking in a covered baker. Now that I know what her setup and raw materials are, I hope to send her a lot more ideas for what she could do with them.
But for now, why be fancy? There's always sugarcane.
And good views and goats to look at in their goat house.

En Route

I'm gone to Uganda.
No updates for three weeks, but I'll bring back pictures.
Like the pictures of the San Francisco sourdough above.
Happy New Year in advance.

Liana's Kitchen

My best and wonderful and only sister remains in Uganda. When I last posted about her, she was just moving to her site, a boarding school in the rural western sector of the country.

Since then, she's been teaching, traveling, and waging an ongoing battle with a hoard of invading rats. It looks suspiciously like karma, as she spent most of the previous year doing rat brain surgery, but I'm going to just chalk it up to fate and the general pervasiveness of vermin.

Her students are coming back now from a month-long vacation, so she's going to spend more time actually teaching, but in the meantime, it looks like she's been learning how to cook, the post-it way. (It's worth clicking on the image to enlarge.)Hopefully, I'll have something to report on what she's cooking shortly. Right now most of the reports verge more on the rat-trapped-in-the-sink variety, but she's working on cat acquisition.