Wildebeest Stew

Our home fellowship group from church has interesting perks.  On Tuesday night, Chris and Martha Kangwa decided to pass out kilos of bush meat that Chris brought home on one of his hunting trips.  With a love for the wild African bush, Chris is a skilled hunter and adventurist.  We’d never prepared, much less eaten Wildebeest before, but when we were handed a frozen package of it… we were all smiles.  Wildebeest is also known as the Gnu, and comes from the antelope family.  So we figured we could handle the challenge.  Andrea did the majority of the research and was told that wildebeest tastes as good as it looks.  We’re not really sure what that was supposed to mean, but wildebeest aren’t exactly handsome looking.  Check out how the meat was looking. Uncertain about how to proceed, Andrea posted a request for suggestions on her facebook page.  Ideas trickled in such as wrapping the meat in pawpaw leaves for tenderizing, and seasoning with ground coffee.  In the end, Andrea incorporated several ideas and prepared an aromatically wild stew.  It definitely had a wild game smell, that I imagined Esau would have been excited about.  And it was actually very tender meat indeed.  We actually invited the Kangwas over to enjoy it with us, but figured we should serve it as a side meat alongside  chicken just in case it wasn’t up to snuff.  The picture at the far top was a snap that the marksman himself took of the herd he was stalking, though I’m not sure which one of them ended up on our plate.

Oil Fire

The other evening I was preparing to make Jobetso Chicken – a great recipe from a South African friend of ours.  In the process, I learned an obvious lesson the hard way.  That was, never leave oil heating unattended.

I needed to borrow tomatoes and went to the Singletons to ask if they had any I could borrow.  As I was over there, I completely forgot that I was heating the oil and began talking with Karen.  Not too long after I was there, Ireen came running over and said, “Mama, you need to come home right away.  The oil is getting too hot.”  Never having experienced an oil fire before, I wasn’t too concerned but did head home.

When I got home I found my favorite pot sitting on our patio with flames billowing out of it.  It was spitting rain, and whenever one of those rain droplettes hit the fire…it created a sort of fire works display.  Inside the house Tim was busy positioning fans at the windows to try and direct the abundant smoke out of the house.  When he did come back outside he sat down and was visibly having trouble breathing.  I went inside to get his inhaler and came out gasping for breath and coughing because of the smoke.

Karen was kind enough to let me cook supper at her place.  When I got home with the supper we ate mostly in silence. Tim shared with me that he had smelled the oil getting hot and went in to check on the pot.  Instinctively he carefully removed the lid and stood back.  Praise the Lord he did, because flames exploded reaching the ceiling.  He threw the lid back on the pot and carefully carried it outside.  I apologized profusely for being careless and putting him in such danger.  All has been forgiven, but I will forever be more careful and attentive with cooking.

Camping in the Kitchen

ZESCO (Zambia Electricity Supply Corporation) is introducing new power cuts this year.  That means that we’ll be camping in our kitchen a lot more.  We have an electric stove – but that may get a little dusty as we pull out our Coleman petrol camping stove.  We’ve been cooking on it once or twice a week for the past year but wouldn’t be surprised if that increases.

Andrea has all sorts of back-up plans and recipes that she can switch over to if there’s a sudden black out.  Now that she’s used to this kitchen reality, she can really function quite well and our family has an assortment of favorite ZESCO recipes.  Baking is a little tricky, but if we plan accordingly, the baking can get done earlier in the day.  The bread’s not hot but that’s okay.

Fly Bread

We don’t know if it’s just us but it seems like there’s an excessive amount of houseflies this season.  Even with screens over our windows we kill fifteen flies in our house everyday. Then, when we eat outside, they swarm us in a terrible way.

Andrea asked me to pick up a loaf of bread for sandwiches.  On my way home I stopped by the Castle bakery and got one that had come right out of the oven.  By the time I got home Andrea had already started making lunch preparations so naturally she needed the bread right away.  When she pulled the bread out of it’s plastic sleeve she found a fly embedded in the bread.

Apparently the bakery is having problems with the fly population too.  The fly must have gotten stuck in the dough and then got baked that way.  Anyway, our family has decided not to take vitamin supplements anymore – we’ll just stick with the vitamin fortified Castle bread.  Besides, it’s cheaper….

Pop Goes the Pop.

This past Thursday we had a board member and his family over for dinner.  Tim thought it would be nice to purchase some “softies” (soda pop) for everyone.  In order to get them cool for dinner, Tim placed them in the freezer and reminded me, “We can’t leave these in there for more than 45min”.  For dinner I chose a selection of softies and left the rest in there assuming we’d get them as soon as people had decided which drinks they wanted.

The evening was wonderful and we really enjoyed our company.  The next day was my day in the office.  After spending the morning in the office, I went grocery shopping and got home around 3pm.  As I was putting away the groceries I looked in the freezer and this is what I saw.  No need to waste a good thing though, Ireen and I enjoyed eating frozen coke out of an upside down glass coke bottle.