Sukuma + some meat: 30 /=
plain Chapati: 10 /=
Soda dogo : 20 /=
A beautiful view on *kitsch* signboards with strange messages: priceless :-)
—-
Remember this post on the matope infested road to our office?
Well, sijui if its for the judge who lives there, but the city town council of Embu today decided to *eventually* do something about it. Atereere…
Aunty Mshairi, the following content is not for your eyes….
There is this jamaa @ university who – whenever he arrives at a new place – opens a bottle of the local beer and takes some time to chill. He told me it’s this ritual he’s been maintaining since he started studying brewery science (that actually is a subject you can study in good old Germany!).
(health experts might forgive me for the selection of chips today. i opted for salad yesterday – which left my unknown neighbour on the table with lots of question marks…”you’ll be hungry tonight..???”….”yeah, but it’s healthier than chips”.)
Coming to one of the Java House branches in Nairobi after some weeks in rural areas always is a refreshing change from a world full of lousy Nescafé “coffee”, way too sweet chai and rough stable food such as Githeri, Mathahaaaaaa and Ugali, not to forget the oily chips or “sicklisch” samosas as my colleague Zakayo calls them. And there IS a huge difference between these tiny samosas @ Mugo Shopping Complex in Embu and the ones which are served in e.g. Java House. In fact, I can’t even smell these greenish goat innards over here my other colleague loves so much. Fortunately. This other colleague from the slopes of Mt.Kenya tells me that “no mbuzi choma is complete without the innards served….in fact, me I can’t even say I had mbuzi when the innards are missing”. My colleague is around 56 years old and…heck, if he had a chance, he would certainly dress like one of those pick-up dudes who party with this earcancer-producing one man guitar show.
But I digress.
A singooool cheese baaggaaa costs around Ksh. 360/= and tastes just like it should taste everywhere in the world where they serve good food. And then of course there’s the coffee….oh my….I never knew I’d freak out for a simpoool coffee. The single cappuccino (sp?) goes for around Ksh. 100 /= – and should be part of every meal. In fact, people come here for the coffee alone.
Now for those who’ve been to Nairobi or who are staying here, the Java House is a well known location where you get decent food & drinks for a decent price at a constant quality (now that IS quality – same quality all the time), served in an appealing environment. And you get to sit next to some interesting piiipolll.
Whereas the Java House Gigiri often only offers an amusing view on UN staff and other aliens, the one downtown gives you a chance of sitting next to a couple that seems to have been trained by Iman & Peter Beard and look as stylish as possible. It makes me think of the glamorous 1970s Blaxpoitation Africa – and I like it.
So, my dear Java House, it’s these impressions I get while munching that delicious cheeseee baagaaa and sipping on my cappu. A good impression that always makes me think of this nice place when I am back in Embu with my cooked carrots, potatoes, slim samosas, overcooked sukuma and gristly beef stew.
..out of an old bottle (when there’s a power failure and only candles to illuminate the room):
1. take a used bottle & cut it into three pieces. throw away the middle part.
2. drill some holes into the lid with the knife of your choice
3. fill it up with some salt…
4. add rice to avoid moisture within the salt…
5. close the shaker by fixing the bottom piece of the bottle
6. ready! (you may want to add some adhesive tape to enhance stability)
Saturday afternoon after some work on an urgent paper (which hindered me from going to Nyeri) I organized some cheap furnitures (cheap as in cheap quality and low – local – prices) for the kitchen + my room and also persuaded the stingy part in me to invest some mbeca for a decent 6 kgs K-GAS meko/gas cooker. The rest of the money was spent on a nice sufuria, flllying pan and vegetabols. And nyama, of course! After all, I urgently wanted to cook for myself and start with a decent steak or at least some beef – anything else but chicken and or – even worse – goat meat.
Roasted goat meat – mbuzi choma…as nice as it is – at 4 pm the city town was already covered by the smell of mbuzi choma and the butchery at our shopping complex was crowded with the usual saturday-evening-nyama-choma-customers who all had their share of the 5 cows which were slaughtered today. I opted for some beef and asked for some nice filet pieces. 1/2 kg for 80 Ksh. – sawasawa, ama?
Sukuma (already cut) and cabbage @ 10 bob each, some Kimbo cooking fat and my new cooking utensils – there you go, cooking your first meal in Embu downtown. Style!
Sukuma + cabbage + coriander + tomatoes + kimbo …
beef + salt + milk + “simba mbili” curry (the BEST curry out there!) …
A great meal, although the beef was wayyyyyy to stiff and should have been roasted instead. I think I won’t cook any meat soon and order it choma @ the bar next door. The sukuma thingy was very delicious though and really made my evening. Also, I really dig this cheapo stainless steel plate. Very easy to handle.
And while cleaning the dishes, I came up with this practical “cutlery holder” mounted to the window frame. It’s simple, it’s free, it wins! (thx, Hash :-).
p.s.: while writing these lines, power went off again and the cool thing is: hakuna shida! Notebook + mobile phone = both run on battery. Great…
That is, I once lost ~ 10 pages of written text due to a power failure on my late Atari 1040 STF (home computer) way back in 1994 in Nbo so it really means much to me to be somehow independent from these frequent power cuts…
p.p.s.: CIRU, Kui, Mich, Daudi, Mbuzimoja…karibuni in Embu! Pls come and I will cook for you! :-)
My colleague called me from Kakamega and told me to go online and download a new binary file for the software we are currently using (the programmer compiled a new binary and had it sent to us – 1,3 MB, which is a lot for the average modem connection).
So I went out at 8 p.m., in the search of a decent inet/cybercafé for kesho asubuhi that would enable such a download. I think they were already closed by that time as I couldn’t find any and also some descriptions aren’t that reliable (“somewhere there down the road behind this building” (waving his hand into that direction). Somewhere can be anywhere.
“Mori turi te salutant” is what I first thought upon catching this scene with my cam:
The bad news: these poor little (fat) kukus were sitting in front of “Morning Glory Hotel” here in Embu, with their feet tied together and awaiting their death “Furahiday” morning.
“Don’t you have any mercy with me?”, I asked the nearby waiter.
Waiter: “Me? Nooo..you see, they can already see their friends being grilled in the oven so they know what will happpen. We will cut their throats tomorrow morning.”
No wonder the place is called Morning Glory…
The good news: Safaricom GPRS works perfectly well. I just made the mistake of using a mixup of sent & own settings so it never worked. But then I thought about deleting all settings and trying it again with a clean installation et voil? : GPRS in Embu, the mobile phone connected via Bluetooth, everything at full speed and no need to look at the clock as the rates are charged per MB downloaded. It really works! Amazing….
…”please don’t put too much oil/fat in the food” – in Kikuyu?
==> “Ndugekire maguta mengi irio-ri”.
