This week I was able to go to a nearby elementary school to learn how to cook some popular local dishes. My favorite food was the sambusa. It is essentially triangle-shaped crispy dough filled with vegetables and spices. First, we had to make the dough by mixing flour, eggs and water in a large bowl. Then we mixed it all together with our hands and had to throw the dough onto a table many times until it resembled playdough. We used a rolling pin to flatten out the pieces and then cut the dough into thin strips to be cooked over the wood fire. Once the dough was crispy, we placed a mix of potatoes, carrots, ginger and green pepper (all of which had been seasoned with curry powder from India) inside the dough triangles we made.
Next, we cracked a coconut in half and scraped the meat out. For this job, we used a stool with a scraper on the end called a kukononazi, which means “pieces of the coconut" in Swahili. These coconut shavings were put in hot water and then squeezed to get coconut-flavored milk to add to the sambusas. Finally, we placed the whole thing in hot oil to fry, and five minutes later we had finished sambusas! They were every bit as delicious as they look and sound. Do you think you'd like sambusas?
