45 – Food for thought

locust - kongwa2london.comOn many occasions I would eat with the servants and become acquainted with more exotic dishes. Locusts are a great source of protein but are better dipped in chocolate sauce. I preferred mine with chocolate rather than being fried and eaten with posho (ground corn and served like mash potato), which was the norm.

You would put some posho between your fingers and pick up food with it. I always found it difficult to eat the fish as it was never skinned nor filleted, making the slippery fish a bone of contention.

We all sampled food from street vendors and Indian sweetmeats from the shops. But the simple task of buying and eating English chocolate was hazardous, you would get a marbling effect from melting and resetting. There was also the need to check the wrapping and the chocolate bar for holes. What was worse than finding a grub in your bar, was finding half a grub.

In our family, a curry was our equivalent of a Sunday roast. Our version is what I call a ‘Kenyan curry’. This consisted of a rice base with the curry nested in the middle, then bananas, ground peanuts, mangoes, raisins, pineapples and finely grated coconut on top. This became a volcano, and you ate through the sweet crust until you reached the hot core.

Most weekends, we used to frequent one particular Mombasa restaurant for curry. The five of us would sit at our regular table on the first floor. Once my sister had asked for a chicken curry and a little later, we heard a kerfuffle from the courtyard. We all peered out of the window just in time to see the cook chasing a headless chicken around the yard. I think my sister chickened out of the curry that day.

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