How McGuiver would cook if he lived in Botswana

Ke itse go apaya mme ga ke na ‘kitchen’…
--I know how to cook but I don’t have a kitchen --

If there is an excuse to bake a cake for an occasion (centenary dives, end of schools/semesters, parties, birthdays, meetings and gatherings…) and I feel so inclined, I will do it. At the start of the semester here there was a spurt of birthdays and one of them was Kaylee’s, I decided it would be fun to take up the challenge of baking an epic birthday cake with a borrowed kitchen of admittedly limited resources.

One of my pet loves is to use everything to its fullest and turn waste to something useful –therefore the cake was the perfect excuse to do just that to compensate for the limited utilities at my disposal. I call it cake-baking-McGuiver style. 

The challenges and solutions are as follows:

Challenge: No Cake pan – only a roasting pan
Solution: Baking brownie ‘slices’ in the pan and stacking them to form a cake.

Challenge: No piping bag for decoration
Solution: Taking a pepsi lid and using a pocket-knife to cut slits in it and the attached pliers to pull out the resulting ‘triangular’ formations as pictured. Then using sticky tape and a clean plastic bag with a slit in the corner to complete the bag.

·       \ Challenge: No spatulas to remove said brownie slice from pan.
Solution: Wooden spoons shuffled slowly bit by bit along the sides of the slices and into the middle, one under each side, to lift the brownie slices out with the addition of helping hands.

·         Challenge: No whisk, hand-held or electric, to beat the cream.
Solution: Two forks interlinked together (and patience) to beat the cream.

·         Challenge: No measuring cup
Solution: An empty 1L bottle cut at approximately ¼ of the capacity (250ml)

·         Challenge: No stencil or similar for writing ‘happy birthday’ decoration.
Solution: A plastic salad bowl lid with letters roughly written on (with eye liner as nothing else would mark the plastic) and then cut out one by one with a little pocket knife.

·         Challenge: No sieve for sprinkling the icing sugar
Solution: A grater to reduce the volume of icing sugar sprinkled across the stencil. Then extreme patience and a deeply held breath to lift the stencil without spilling the excess sugar and destroying the letters.

·         Challenge: No food processor with which to crumble the biscuits for the ‘cookies n cream’ filling.
Solution: Placing said biscuit packets in tightly-sealed plastic bags and repeatedly ‘bashing’ these bags against the walls, floor and anything hard (yes, this was quite fun!)

The result? A stacked brownie cake with chocolate glaze, cookies and cream icing filling and piped caramel decorations. And of course, a happy Kaylee and cake consumers.

General food without a kitchen

In an effort to make students eat at the refectories (cafeteria’s) on campus, there are no kitchens in the undergraduate dorms. Of course, in a country with a beef dominated industry you can imagine that the vegetarian food isn’t very good. Don’t get me wrong, at “Moghul” there is a cheap (<$2), incredibly filling meal with vegetarian options, but given that it is the same meal every single day you tend to crave some variety. So I came up with a few solutions to satisfy my cravings for good, healthy food without a kitchen.

Basic Guacamole “Bruschetta”

Ingredients: Tomato, onion, lemon juice, ripe avocadoes and ‘pesto parmesan’ salted seasoning.
Base: Rye/Maize ‘crispbread’

In short: I diced the tomatos/onions, mashed the avocados with the plastic forks I’ve been re-using from take-out and added the lemon juice and seasoning to taste. The effect of the seasoning and the lemon juice with the onion and tomato really does recreate a bruschetta effect. The crispbread, whilst on its own is strange and sticks to the roof of your mouth, actually merges perfectly with the avocado mix and resembles a more ‘toast’ like texture.

Budget: This is actually a reasonably cheap thing to make if you know where to buy things. Avocadoes can be <$2 for a 6 pack of small ones at pick and pay but easily double that if you go to woollies/spar.

Vegie Burger

Ingredients: Frozen vegie patties (Fry’s brand), beetroot, tomato, lettuce, chakalaka (or other chutney/sauce), gouda/cheddar cheese
Base: Phaphatha (An ‘english-muffin’ style bread accessible everywhere).
In many respects this is like a sandwich and therefore not too complicated – the main challenge is reheating and defrosting the patty. This is where the kettle comes in. You leave the lid of the kettle open and prop a container in the top that just fits so that it rests there and doesn’t fall in. Inside this, you put the patty. Place water about ½- ¾ up the kettle and let it boil. With the little opening it’ll probably keep boiling and won’t turn off. Once it’s warm, it’s good!

Budget: Veggie burgers on special were $2 for four. Phaphtha is always <25c. Then there’s the veggies etc, but these don’t add much to the cost.

Salads:

When everyone thinks of salad they think of ‘garnish’ (ie not very filling). But provided you have a good protein source and perhaps some form of carbs (crispbread/phaphatha etc) it can make quite a decent meal.

Eggs: One of the main things I add to a salad is egg (my protein! Om nom nom). Using the kettle you can prepare your eggs in pretty much 2 ways; boiled or scrambled.  I opt for the former. First I boil the water at half capacity and then add some cold water. Then I add the eggs. If I add it when its boiling often the temperature differential seems to make it crack, (which makes a mess) so I add it when its ‘hot’ and then boil from there. Similarly, if I add it at the start, the kettle boils too quickly and causes the eggs to ‘bounce’ around and smash against each other. Obviously a kettle doesn’t continuously boil, so I let it rest between periodic boils (ie 2-3 boils).

Some kind of fat: I won’t find a salad filling unless there’s some kind of fat. So I’ll either keep the egg yolk (if an egg salad) or add avocado or nuts or cheese.

Beans: Sometimes I’ll use tinned beans instead of egg as a protein (+carb) filling replacement.

Veggies: I’ll start with a salad base (either lettuce or carrots depending on price and seasonality) and pretty much always have tomato (this is one thing they actually grow in east Bots). Other additions include onion, beetroot (it abounds in southern Africa; its one of their staple ‘salad’ sides), peppers (capsicum), cucumber etc. Other times I will get some misc selections from pick n pay.

FLAVOUR: This is the key to me enjoying my meal. I’ll often add dried mixed herbs (basil/oregano/thyme type of mix), pepper, peri-salt or the pesto parmesan seasoning and top it off with some simply dressing (ie a greek salad/yogurt mix or honey mustard).

Michelle + her dose of vegetables = Happy.

Real-brewed coffee

The fanciest coffee venue on campus has the motto ‘mix-it-the-way-you-like!’ That is, this fancy coffee blend, is just instant coffee. Yup. Deciding I wanted a real brewed coffee on a budget, I constructed a make-shift cost-less coffee filter system instead and spent the money on real ground coffee from Woolworths (note Woolworths in Africa is not the same as the one in Aus, it is more of a fancy grocers).

Construction of the coffee filter:

·         I took the disposable coffee cup from my plane trip and poked 4-holes in the bottom.

·         I took the lid from one of the take-away salad containers and make a whole in the middle of the cup to rest in, whilst the ‘skirt’ (ie remainder of the lid) could then be propped ontop of the cup the coffee is being filtered into. I line this with a coffee filter, place 1-2T of coffee in this and let it trickle/brew through the coffee grounds into the cup below.

And there I had it; quality coffee (I generally add some milk too of course)….

                The transition to iced coffee

Alas, despite my love for coffee, on the incredibly intense hot days that frequent Gabs, I decided I had to make a brewed cold coffee. To do this, I brew the coffee as usual, add sugar and/or hot chocolate mix and dissolve. I top up with some water, sometimes cinnamon and always ‘caramel essence.’ I finish with the addition of cold milk and leave it in the fridge to cool. For desert, we sometimes add “Amarula” (African equivalent of Baileys bur better). You’ll have to taste it to appreciate it…

Warm-hot milk

If ever I want to make warm/hot milk, I follow a process similar to the defrosting mentioned above. I pop the milk in a container and rest it at the top of the kettle making sure the water level at least hits the bottom. I put the lid on the container to speed up the heating process. A couple of mixes and minutes later, some hot milk!

General meals at Refectories on campus

There are two refectories on campus; Moghul and Curry Pot. The latter is pretty bad for vegetarians, but the former at least has options.

For 15.50 pula(<$2) at Moghul you can get a plate of:

Sorghum/beans
Veggie Patty
Salad (either mashed pumpkin, beetroot or typical green salad)
Fruit or Milk

I only dare Moghul at lunch times. They heap so much onto your plate (and Sorghum is verrryy heavy and filling) that I can’t eat for hours after a Moghul meal.

Thanks-giving Dinner
Most of the international kids at UB were from America, so naturally we celebrated their Thanksgiving pot-luck style, with everyone bringing their own kettle-creations.

Other ways to make use of Waste

So I like my cordial/ soft drinks and these obviously come in (generally) plastic bottles. Problem? There is no plastic recycling on campus or in Gaborone for that matter. Oh, and I am a bit of an OCD anti-waste Nazi.

Solutions (or part there of – apart from trying to drink cordial rather than soft drinks as these dilute and go further per plastic bottle)…

In their full form –

·         Water carriers for camping

With a bit of chopping…

·         Bottles cut in half and used as stationary holders, pinned into my pin-board

·         Smaller plastic bottles, also cut in half, used as light-weight wine classes when camping. Also good for hot chocolate/ coffee in the morning.

·         Similarly, bottles with the end cut-off are great ‘spare’ cups for when you have friends around for tea and only one mug…

·         Given the known volume of bottles, you can cut them off in approximate sizes as measuring cups (ie ½ cup or 1 cup)

Additionally

·         Plastic tubs (yogurt /small ice cream tubs etc) make perfect carriers for jelly and you know the volume for measurement purposes. They also make good containers for housing fruit salad/ left over food and brewing coffee in the process of preparing the ice coffee mix.

·         Cardboard boxes such as museli bar boxes etc: These can be formed into cutlery holders (meanwhile you can hang on to and re-use the disposable cutlery from take away) and additional stationary holders.

·         Disposable coffee cup/ bottle: Also pinned to the pinboard, these can house museli bars.

·         The general obvious: by keeping my little plastic collections, I’ve been able to take portions of food camping in containers (ie sugar) and provide little nibble-mixes for our in room movie sessions with laptops =P

The above pic contains: clothes line made of unused telephone cable, museli bar holders (paper cups pinned to the wall), plastic container housing headbands, half-bottles containing scissors, nail clippers, pens, pencils, etc, a cardboard box halve holding my calculator/eraser etc.... packets of nuts also pinned, plastic bags to be used for rubbish.... It was my 'everything' pinboard. the rooms were like shoeboxes so you needed to save space somehow...