The Tastes of Tanzania

One of the first things people do when traveling to new places is try the new cuisine. So far I've had the Tanzanian staples of Ugali (corn flour and rice in a sort of thick paste), beans, and rice, as well as a wide assortment of fruits from bananas to guavas. The avocadoes are so much better here! Anyway, I wanted to tell you about one of my favorite dishes, Chips Mayai, which ahome vendor across from the school cooks up, but I found a BBC article that explains it much better than I would while giving a brief overview of Tanzanian history, so I've reposted it here:


Chips Mayai - 2nd National Dish of Tanzania?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A22548431

For the westerners palate the national dish of Tanzania called Ugali often tastes as nice as is sounds. This mixture of maize flour and water can range from a porridge-like consistency right up to a dough-like ball. It's a cheap source of carbohydrate and so it gets eaten by the poorest people the length and breadth of the country; it is rightly the national dish of Tanzania. Usually eaten in its more solid state, it can be dipped into a stew often containing vegetables and very occasionally some meat.

Yet this meal is often rejected by westerners in favour of what has got to be the country's second most popular dish, the Chips Mayai.

What is it?
This simple meal is exactly as it is described, Chips and Mayai - or for those of you who don't speak KiSwahili, Chips and Egg. It's worth noting at this point that Tanzania is a nation made up of many tribes1 all speaking languages based on a common Bantu root. Therefore the proper name for the language spoken by the members of the coastal Swahili tribe should be KiSwahili.
Getting back to the meal in question - a Chips Mayai is exactly what it sounds like, egg and chips. Now many nations enjoy food based on chips, the Quebec, Canada Poutine for example, however unlike the traditional British egg and chips that can be found in greasy spoons up and down the UK, a Tanzanian egg and chips is really just a chip omelette.

How to make one?
To make one the chef will start by frying up a portion of chips. It's important to note at this point that they will never be American 'fries'. The country of German East Africa was originally created as part of the German empire, but after the First World War the League of Nations gave control of the territory to the British and the country became the colony of Tanganyika. When Tanganyika became independent of Britain in the 1960s, it merged with the island of Zanzibar to form the country Tanzania. The country never became as 'colonial' as its northern cousin Kenya while under British rule, but the country still has strong British links and most educated people speak some English2. Due to this British influence the country drives on the left and eats proper Chips3.

Right, ramble over, back to the process, the chef will place the newly-cooked chips into a large frying pan and an omelette mixture will poured over the top. This pancake-shaped object will then be cooked - really that simple!

Eating one in Tanzania
In Tanzania a Chips Mayai makes an ideal lunchtime snack and is usually provided with a bottle of tomato ketchup or even better a tomato and chili ketchup. As an added extra a few slices of fresh tomato are often placed on the side of the plate or, if the consumer is really lucky, a few spoonfuls of spicy ground beef are piled on the top. Chips Mayai is sold all over the country from little cafes where the furniture is usually of the cheap plastic 'garden furniture' style, to roadside rest stops. Some of these can be heaven-sent if the consumer has spent the last nine hours in a cramped bus on an unpaved broken road; here the Chips Mayai is often cooked on a portable trolley and served in newspaper just like Fish and Chips were served in Britain years ago.

Eating one elsewhere
This all sounds great, but how do you get one if you're not in Tanzania? Well, for a start the British connoisseur has it easy, they can just go to their local chip shop and order a portion of chips and make one themselves. If, however, you are unlucky enough not to have a local 'Chippy' then you will need to make your own chips. Don't worry though, it's easy enough to do. If you don't know how, just try any one of these recipes for example, they would all do the job;
How to make Chips by Heston Blumenthal
How to make Chips by the British Potato Council
Homemade oven chips by the British Potato Council
For the authentic Chips Mayai though you probably don't really want perfect chips, the dish actually tastes nicer if you use the slightly soggy chips that come at the end of a batch. Whatever chips you use, put them aside to keep warm. Take out some large fresh eggs and break a few into a mixing jug, take a fork and beat the eggs to make an omelette mixture. Pour some of the chips into a hot non-sticking frying pan and spread them out evenly throughout the pan. Pour the omelette mixture over the top so that it just covers the chips and cook until the egg mixture turns golden on both sides. Serve on a plate, sit back and dream of the Kilimanjaro...
Enjoy!

1 The WaMassai or simply just Massai are probably the most famous tribes, but there are hundreds of others such as the Wagogo, Wahehe, and the Wachaga.2 In reality most Tanzanians speak their own tribal language as their first language, Swahili as the language of day-to-day conversation with other Tanzanians and then finally English.3 To explain this to any American readers, British chips are much more like American steak-cut fries rather than traditional French Fries.

Safe and sound in Iringa Town!

It truly is a blessing to be here in Iringa, Tanzania at the Ruaha School. I was waylayed in Dar for a few days as the director and her husband came to pick me up but got a flat tire (a common occurance) and busted the rim of the tire (a more serious issue). It was a blessing though as I got to meet more Bahais in Dar as well as got to see a little of the city. The new US Embassy is a veritable guarded fortress, which makes sense since it was bombed in 1998.

Iringa is an 8 hour drive southwest inland from Dar Es Salaam in the highlands. To get there we drove through the second largest national park and I saw giraffe, zebra, elephant, gazelle, and buffalo. It was pretty cool, though I didn't take any pictures. Iringa is beautiful and the weather is perfect. Being as it's winter here it is in the 60s and 70s, though it gets pretty windy at night. The scenery kind of looks like Montana with Baobab trees. I'm sure that once summer comes and then the wet season I might amend my statement, but for now it is quite lovely.

The school itself is outside of the main town, next to a village, in its own little compound. It has its own dining hall, dairy, workshop, library, store, soccer fields, basketball courts, computer lab, and housing for staff and students. It's like its own little town. My house is currently being painted, so I am staying temporarily in the girls' hostel in the prefects' quarters. When I move in next week I'll be sure to put up photos, as well as photos of the campus. For now, if you are curious here is a link to a webpage about the school: http://www.monafoundation.org/ruaha/ruaha.htm

Other than that, I have explored the town a bit, including the market which was quite fun. It is really amazing the difference in relative prices of things. Like two kilos of onions or tomatoes (4.4 pounds for the Americans in the audience) costs half as much as a chocolate bar. Something tells me I'll be losing weight here :) The other year-of-service volunteers brought me to a craftshop/cafe called Neema's for lunch. They have panini there which was delightful, and though it is overpriced (again all relative) it supports a good cause as all the employees are either from the deaf school or have some other disability and would be unable to work were it not for the mission.

Well, that's it for now. I promise once I am settled to load up photos and to tell more fun stories. We have a real international crowd here with people from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Bhutan, Ecuador, and Sweden just to name a few. But I'll save those stories for future posts.