Learning to Cook Tanzanian Style!

Hello everyone! 

Today we had an extra exciting cultural activity: learning to cook the delicious food we have had the privilege to consume each and every day while we have been in Tanzania. We arrived quite early in the backyard of a home and spent about three hours learning to cook a multitude of things. The breakfast foods we learned to make were our favorites: chapati (kind of like a tortilla but WAY better) and mandazi (kind of like a donut but also WAY better). In addition to these two things we cut and peeled the vegetables and sorted through the peas to make a delicious side dish. We also learned how to make chipsi mayai (basically a French fry omelette) and chicken! We learned how to cook all of these things over a three stone fire which was very exciting and helped the girls to understand how much effort their homestay families put in when making them meals each day. We topped the day off with yummy tikiti maji (watermelon). Overall, the activity was a bit of a challenge because foods like chapati and mandazi look like they will be easy to make, but simple parts of the process like rotating the dough in the pan the correct way were actually quite difficult! Thank you to our teachers for being so patient with us and teaching us to laugh at ourselves! 

This was one of our group’s favorite activities for many reasons: 1) we got to actually eat the food we made 2) there were a ton of extras that we were able to roll up and take with us and 3) we took notes on how to make each item so that we can bring these recipes home and make them for our families when we get back to the States. We are pretty sure our attempts in the States will not be half as good as the food here but it’s worth a try and was so much fun to learn! 

The gallery has a few pictures from the day! We hope you enjoy them as much as we enjoyed taking part in this activity!

Xoxo Dee and the Iringa Session 2 Girls