the final stretch! + pictures of food

I realize I haven't updated anything in a while. I left Kianyaga on Friday, August 8 and haven't had good Internet access since then to upload photos... but now I do. So I'm going to post a lot of things this weekend (starting now) because I have gone to a lot of places in the last two weeks! 

First though, I want to share some pictures of what I ate very frequently in Kianyaga. People from my office would go to a nearby restaurant called "Refresher" almost everyday, and I would say I ended up eating there on average 3-4 times a week throughout the summer. Their food was so delicious.

Unfortunately, Refresher had an extremely limited menu. Everything I ordered there was some combination of (1) rice or chapati (or both, if you're really hungry), (2) beans or githeri, which is beans and maize, (3) greens and cabbage. Fortunately, I love rice and beans. It's basically my cheap college diet anyway.

Rice and beans with sukuma wiki (collard greens) and cabbage

I really liked the beans they used at Refresher. In the local language Kikuyu they're called wairimu beans. I'm not sure they have an English name.

Two chapatis 

I usually cooked rice for dinner, so I would prefer to have chapati for lunch if I was choosing between the two. Chapati is a staple food in Kenya. The dough is made from just water and flour, cooked on a thick pan (the "chapati pan") with a very, very generous coating of oil or shortening. Pretty much everyone knows how to make chapati because it's so easy, and most families have a special chapati pan. You can get chapati at any Kenyan restaurant, usually costing between 10-40 ksh (about CAD 0.12-0.50). It really doesn't look or taste that oily but seeing chapati made is a little frightening because there is so, so much oil used.

Chapati comes in various degrees of thickness and softness. I had the most amazing chapati at a side of the road stall in the Rift Valley, but Refresher chapati was almost as good. I generally love chapati, but I have had some bad chapati both in Kianyaga and in the rest of Kenya and ... bad chapati is awful.

Githeri with greens and cabbage, served with stew (soup) and chapati

While beans are definitely a staple food in Kenya, most restaurants don't serve them alone. Rather, they're cooked in a classic Kenyan dish called githeri, which is beans and maize. At home, Kenyans might add pumpkins, greens, potatoes or other vegetables, but at restaurants, it's usually served plain, cooked maybe with some tomatoes and onions (as Refresher does) or with some small pieces of meat. Restaurants will often also give you some beef-flavoured broth to add to the githeri to add flavour and moisture.

Githeri + chapati was my favourite combination of food to get for lunch. I can't even name how many times I've had it, definitely dozens. As you can see, it's a lot of food and I would be incapable of stopping myself from finishing it even if I was full! So I generally ate small breakfasts, if at all, and only went to Refresher if I was feeling really hungry. After eating at Refresher I would always feel super super full, sometimes uncomfortably so, and would sometimes end up eating no dinner or just some fruit for dinner because lunch was so filling.

I kept a fairly vegetarian diet in Kianyaga. I think I ate meat four times in Kianyaga all summer (once at a restaurant, once at a friend's house, twice at office events). The beef cooked in Kianyaga was just sooo tough, and the meat at the butcher was honestly a little mysterious looking and you don't have choice over the cut - it's just random chunks of meat, sometimes with a lot of fat. So I became a Kianyaga vegetarian. I relied on eggs, beans, and lentils for my protein. Really missed tofu.

At Refresher with Peter, who runs Refresher.