Sometimes there’s a chicken in the kitchen
Kitchens are separate from the house. Here you see a typical small shack with no chimney so it gets pretty smoky inside when things are cooking. The stove needs to be covered because of the rainy season There is usually a seat, a mortar for grinding g-nuts into paste, and a and a pot. In some cases there is a drying rack in indoors.The middle photo shows a drying rack for utensils and dishes.. This keeps them off of the ground and allows them to dry completely. The typical stove is show on the far right – it is a group of three large stones and the fire in made between them. The pot rests on top. Various cooking tools include a “mingling stick” what we’d call a wooden spoon, a gourd to hold oil and the ubiquitous yellow gerry can for water. Banana leaves are used to cover the food and keep the in the moisture.
This is a unique stove that’s a bit like a woodstove with two holes on top. They have built clay walls that surround the hearth and it features a chimney. The pots go over the holes. Not only does this design divert the smoke outside, it also reduces the amount of wood used – one of the key challenges being worked on by the Earth Instittue – wood for burning is quickly deforesting the landscape. There are two efforts, one to plant a milion trees and the other is to find ways to make cooking more efficient. They have been working on a new stove design – I haven’t seen it yet.
In this case they are using corn cobs as an alternative source (lower right).
My guess is that they cook one pot of motoki a day and leave it wrapped in banana leaves. The other foods that I’ve seen at the market consist of tomatoes, cabbage, onions, “irish” (white potatoes), and egg plant, a small round vegetable about the size of an egg, and white. Speaking of which the yolks of the eggs tend to be very pale. Very little spice is used, lots of salt and ghee. The street vendors sell grill meat on sticks (primarily goat), samosas and chapati.
Note the metal roof, vents and the large window – all unusual features.
The is the kichen for the hotel next door (far left) – hotel’s are really restaurants that you bring your plate to and for 500 shillings (about a quarter) they peel back the banana leaves and heap on the local staple of cooked and mashed plantains. (This where the chicken was hanging out.) We ordered one plate and divided it in half. The samosas are part of a box lunch from the lodge which quickly became a distant memory. The stack of stools were bought at a roadside market between Kampala and Mbarara – they are incredible comfortable.
This is the g-nut mortar. Roasted G-nuts are not as dense as peanuts and have a slightly sweet flavor. The bananas are a common sight in a kitchen – the bowl is filled with peels and you can see some chucks of matoki on the floor. Here is the kitchen at the field office. Only one of the burners works at the moment, but we manage to cook dinner every night huddles around the stove by candle light. We also heat water for our bucket baths and tea. There is a lock on the rainwater collection tank to keep the neighbors from tapping in. The kitchen, which is about six feet by six feet could really use a shelf.
