Adventures in Lesotho: Chicken Fingers

As most of my family and friends know, I’m a pretty picky eater. College has done many wonders for expanding my palette, but still I’m a sucker for plain pasta with marinara sauce and some good ole’ chicken fingers. So, naturally, I had a bit of anxiety about becoming a bit malnourished myself while living in Africa for six weeks. What’s funny is I’ve had a lot of typical American food while I’m here because we cook our own meals in TTL’s kitchen, so I’ve been well fed. I even brought enough protein bars to last me for an entire five weeks worth of outreach days! Let me tell you, though, cooking in a developing country is not as easy as I just made it sound.

Hard at work in the fields.

First of all, the options for ingredients in Mokhotlong are limited. In fact, to get any dairy products aside from whole milk and some sketchy cheese slices, we have to travel to a grocery store 5 hours away in Maseru…no joke! Maseru is also the only place to get safe-to-eat meat (I miss my chicken fingers!). For this reason, every time someone gets picked up or dropped off at the airport there, all of us living at TTL send money and a shopping list with the driver. We actually went straight to Pick n’ Pay, the food store with the largest selection of items in Maseru, from the airport when I arrived a month ago. It was pretty overwhelming try to plan meals three weeks in advance, and it still is! Needless to say, we use each food item sparingly. Not only are dairy products hard to come by, but so are fruits and vegetables aside from the spinach that grows in TTL’s garden. Luckily, there is a truck that arrives on Mokhotlong every Wednesday full of fruits and vegetables from South Africa. If you don’t get to it’s stop right away, however, your options become limited quickly. It seems as if everyone is town rushes to the “fruit & veg” truck (as we call it) to gather their stock for the week…you snooze you lose!

Maize from one of TTL's clients (Read below!)

Maize grinder in a rondavel.

As if planning so far in advance wasn’t a hard enough adjustment for this girl who’s been getting prepared training table dinners for the past 2 years, I quickly learned that following online recipes isn’t always so easy. We have to substitute ingredients quite often, which always makes for an interesting meal. Last week Brad and I attempted to make a stir fry peanut sauce…let’s just say we had to add a lot of milk and water to dampen the taste of white vinegar and cayenne pepper. Luckily, I have two working parents with quick and easy meal recipes (that still require some substitutions!) that have saved dinner time ever since. And there’s always South Africa’s version of Honey Cheerio’s if all else fails.

Speaking of Cheerio’s, I was totally freaked out by the milk when I first arrived here. We drink UHT milk (ultra-high-temperature processed milk), a super-pasteurized milk product that you don’t need to refrigerate it until it’s opened. You’re probably thinking sour milk, but I’m thinking Alleluliah! If we had to refrigerate all of our milk, there wouldn’t be room for anything else in the refrigerator. It actually tastes pretty normal, and is really useful for people in Mokhotlong who don’t all have access to a large refrigerator (if they have one at all). Apparently a lot of people drink it in Europe, but there is much debate on whether drinking this type of milk is really a healthy option. I’ve had no digestive problems so far, and in a place with no other real options, UHT milk is better than no milk.

Maize meal, maize meal, everywhere! At a shop in Mokhotlong owned by an outreach worker's brother.

Okay, back to the cooking. One night, right in the middle of Colleen and I cooking a meal, all of the power went off in Mokhotlong. Not a home in sight had power! (Except for TTL’s safe home, which has an emergency generator to keep the babies warm.) All of a sudden, it was like we were living in the villages. We cooked the rest of the meal and ate it by candle light, hoping the power would come back by the next morning. All of the power going out doesn’t happen too often, but our internet connection gets lost all the time – both true reminders that I’m living in a developing country.

Candle light cooking...candle light meal!

From the first day I got here, all I kept hear about was papa and moroho, the traditional Basotho meal (seriously, they sometimes eat this morning, noon, and night). The way they say it almost makes it sound like a Spanish meal! “Papa” refers to cooked maize meal, which is essentially plain southern gritz with all of the moisture sucked out of it. Moroho refers to any sort of green vegetable, usually cabbage, spinach, or kale. On days I didn’t go on outreach, I would always find TTL’s staff sitting outside eating this for lunch. I decided to ask them about it one afternoon, and they were nice enough to cook some for me! I gathered the maize meal from our kitchen, had our gardener pick some spinach for me, pulled out the pots, and got to cooking (well, I didn’t really do the cooking, I just watched and learned). Basotho chop the spinach into small pieces and fry it with some flavoringor spices, we added beef stock cubes, while the papa are cooked just like rice. When its finished, you put them on a plate next to each other and eat it with your hands! It felt odd to eat food with my hands, but sort of freeing at the same time…don’t worry, I won’t be using this technique in American restaurants anytime soon. I really enjoyed this meal and decided in typical Basotho fashion to eat it for lunch and dinner! Much of the time some sort of meat is paired with it, like eggs or matton (sheep meat), in order to create a balanced meal.

TTL's gardener picking spinach from the garden for our "moroho"

Maize meal (papa) and spinach (moroho)!

The finished product...yum!

Generally in the villages, meat is expensive and scarce, so the diet is largely based on carbs like maize and wheat. Hence why TTL gives nutritional supplements full of protein, such as minced meat, fish, and beans. On one outreach visit, a mother gave my translator and I some maize from her fields…it was very yummy! In some of the rondavels I’ve spotted small maize grinders that people use to make papa from scratch. Basotho usually use wheat to make homemade bread. Makoenya bread, steam bread, large doughy bread, thin circular bread…you name it, they’ve got it. Did I mention potatoes are big here too? Basotho often make french fries at home, but they refer to them as "chips" like in Britain. The spices they scatter on top are just so tasty! I don’t know how anyone here remains skinny surrounded by all these carbs. In fact, I think I’ll be avoiding the scale for the first few days I’m back home…

Makoenya's frying in the best makoenya shop in town

This was the fluffiest (and largest slice of) bread I've ever had!

Sephaphathoa (say-pah-pah-twa) bread...yum!

Another important aspect of Basotho food culture is joala (jwala), or beer. The word joala means beer, so it can refer to any can or bottle of beer. Basotho joala, however, is home-fermented beer. Women make joala and sell it to make money both in town and out in the villages, and rondavels or shops selling joala always have a white “flag” outside of it (I put flag in parentheses because the flag is usually just a piece of white cloth or a bag tied to the top of a long tree trunk). There is one area in town where a large group of “bars” (tin shops labeled as a bar) sell joala and have their white flags flying…we call it the Joala District! Colleen and I decided that we had to try Basotho joala because we heard it was very strong. We bought it from a tin shop, took one sip, and vowed to never have it again. It did taste strongly of alcohol, but because it’s homemade the texture is very grainy and it’s not very tasty. Worth the try!

My first joala tasting....didn't love it!

The Joala Doistrict...check out all those white flags!

So finally, on my second to last night here, I got my chicken fingers! Literally, they were chicken fingers. I find that when I’m in a foreign country, I get the urge to try local delicacies that I would never touch at home (in Ecuador I ate guinea pig!). During my first week here I thought I saw someone eating chicken feet, but quickly told myself there was no way. It turns out I was right, and the people here love it! Tonight, on the way back from outreach, my translator had the driver stop at a small shop to get me chicken feet. The flavor was good, but boy was the texture weird. At first I tried to eat it like a chicken wing, but then realized all I was getting at was skin and some tendon. After building up the courage and watching my translator nearly die laughing at me, I decided to do as the Basotho and just bite the toe right off the foot…nail and all. It was crunchy, and the more I thought about what I was eating the more I decided this last bite was enough. I can’t say that I will ever eat chicken feet again, but I’m glad I tasted it while I was here. I think I’ve just decided that my first meal back in the US will be real chicken fingers…or maybe chicken tenders is how I will refer to them from now on! USA here I come!