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...
