Kenyan Thanksgiving

As you may know, one of my favorite recipes ever is Potato and Kale Enchiladas from Veganomicon, which I'm excited to say I was successfully able to make (Kenyan fusion style) for Thanksgiving Potluck Part 2. I'm even more excited to be eating the leftovers for breakfast right now, along with Silk soy milk that a friend bestowed on me after her parents brought it all the way from Pennsylvania, and pistachios roasted with salt and lemon. Kenyan fusion style means cassava instead of potato, sukuma wiki instead of kale, cashews instead of pumpkin seeds, and a friend's homemade tortillas/chapattis. The non-Kenyan part is the delicious spiciness and lack of cornmeal. I bought the cassava when I was out in the field the other day, and for $.75 got probably 5 kg of awesome fresh cassava, so also had to find another cassava recipe, and although I thought long and hard about making this, and following carefully the directions at the end:

• 25 After eating, wash your hands and take your plates to wash
  
• 26 After washing, keep them in the safe place and rest for some minutes in order to allow your food function well into your body.Here you may call it a day
  

I decided that garlic and lime (all small sour citrus fruits are called lemon here, actually, regardless of how dark green they are) would be the best ever, because honestly why isn't everything garlic and lime flavored, and made this one.

All the food brought by everyone else was obviously delicious too, although I didn't try the locally raised turkey, which apparently costs way more than chicken because people around here don't really eat turkeys so much as use them as guard dogs. But the adventure of the day was jackfruit. Every morning, Steph and Jo and I sit and wait for the shuttle to Kisian under a jackfruit tree, and wonder what tragedy would occur if the fruit fell off the tree. We finally got up the nerve to ask the staff at the hotel whether we could have one, and they were nice enough to give us one for free (no one here eats them, although you can see them for sale in Uganda). We called it a baby and carried it around, letting it stink up the car while we ran some errands, and later on Ricky showed us how to prepare it. The slimy stickiness got everywhere and we made some of the fruit into smoothies but overall were unable to handle the sickly sweetness, but we did have fun shooting the seeds at each other. If it had been an unripe one, I would have tried this recipe...

Our jackfruit baby/small child

As for real Thanksgiving (on Thursday), I worked all day which was very eventful, since everyone goes on leave pretty early in December and therefore freaks out at the end of November about all the things that need to be done by the end of the year, for example transitioning the entire Human Morbidity Survey from PDAs to smartphones in 4 weeks… Also apparently in the Nairobi KEMRI/CDC office they take off both Kenyan and American holidays but here we only get Kenyan ones. Then I attended a potluck with lots of high ranking CDC and Walter Reed people, and the cultural differences between civilian and army health research organizations was glaringly obvious, so John the statistician decided that his next job should be writing an awkward style sitcom about CDC and Walter Reed employees in Kisumu. I'll let you know when it comes out.