[Minamoo]

Salima is that you?

Edited to add: Having though about that.....i am sure there are more people who live in toronto who aren't my sis. I will dig out the recipes at some point and post them on.

[Minamoo]

Hehe! yes. keki ya karoti is carrot cake.

[Minamoo]

ahh but coconut milk is not the same as coconut water which is the thin stuff in the coconut. What we do back home when we can't be bothered to do it properly is take the flesh out, cut it as small as you can, chuck it in a blender with 1 cup water, blend, push through a sieve, put the bits back in the blender with another cup of water, repeat once more. Combine the second and third cups of milk together to make thin coconut milk and keep the first one separate as thick coconut milk. You start the food off with the thin coconut milk and when it's reduced dowm, add the thick milk.

Option 2: push loads of nails into a board in such a way as the pointy ends stick out and use the nail ends to scrape out the coconut flesh before processing in blender as above.

et voila. you have some thick and some thin coconut milk. Let me know how that recipe turns out. If it disasterifies I can give you my mum's.

Mum's vibibi recipe uses:

1 cup rice
1 cup coconut milk
1 egg
1tsp yeast.

Soak rice overnight (min. 12 hours). Mix all ingredients together and put in blender. Blend till smooth. Leave to rise. Put heavy frying pan on hob on v. low heat with a little ghee in. Put in a little mixture andleave till it rises. The frying pan MUST be tightly covered so that the vibibi sort of steam as thy cook. Turn onto cast iron griddle pan/tawa/chuma cha chapati on very low heat and cook till set and brown on both sides. Serve with coconut syrup.

Mum's manda (a kind of barawa (dad's tribe) bread that's similar to mkate wa mofa which is a swahili sour dough bread made with brown flour and millet flour and flavoured with some onions)

1 cup maize flour
1tsp salt
1tbsp sugar
1tsp yeast
1 3/4 cups water
2 cups flour

put maize flour in bowl, bring water to boil, pour over flour and stir to mix. Cover and leave till completely cool (overnight best, min 6 hours)Add plain flour, sugar and salt and mix thoroughly. do not add any more water or flour! Add yeast and leave to rise. Preheat oven to about 180C and put in a round heavy(ish) pan with a tight fitting lid and heat it up. When it's hot, put in 4 balls of the dough and do not press down. Cover pan tightly and put back into oven till cooked (skewer will come out clean) and it will look slightly brown on the edges. These freeze very well and can be reheated in oven, microwave or by steaming.

[Minamoo]

Lol! I love the idea of "spare time"! I am honestly starting to think about whether it might be worth it for me to take a year out after I finish my PhD to do all the other things I really want to be doing but can't cos of the PhD guilt. I could continue to write and try to publish articles in academic journals so that people know of me by the time I get round to trying to get a post doc/lectureship. But it would mean that I could properly start our Msitu preserves business, write my swahili inspired wild food cookbook (with such things as little nettle and ground elder stem and goat's cheese pastries, to wild mushroom mtabaki (a kind of swahili pie involving layers of samosa pastry and filling which is then baked), swahili nettle and coconut curry, bread flavoured with garlic mustard seeds.....), have time to sell all the kenyan crafts, fabrics, handbags and jewellery that I brought with me, register the Nuru School as a charity in the UK (It's currently only registered in Kenya), have time to organise a proper volunteering scheme for people to go to Malindi and build the new nuru school..... Oh....so much stuff. So little time. Sigh.

[Minamoo]

Knock yourself out! It was the first time I put anything on there so wasn't 100% sure what to do.

[James]

Thats what I love about DS. There's a resident expert in stuff you never even thourght we'd have resident expert in. I couldn't even read the title....now, having read the thread, there's all sorts of new & exciting stuff to cook.