I hit the 4 o’clock hour. The question starts hovering over my thoughts, weighing me down. “What am I going to make for dinner tonight?” First stop: the cupboard. As expected there are dried beans and rice, dried pasta noodles and plain cans of tomatoes. There are a few scattered spices. I open the fridge, but only for 5 seconds because there is no power and I have already lost too many things to the thawing of the fridge for lack of electricity. Oh yes, it’s all still there: a few eggs from a local farmer, a tiny hunk of cheese that cost me at least 10 dollars, an inherited bottle of mayonnaise, some local zucchini that gives you slivers if you touch it, a half-eaten giant papaya, a costco size bottle of parmesan that you are rationing out in small quantities to see how long you can make it last, raw milk that you are still not sure what to do with, and local tomatoes that might have already passed their time.
Sigh.
I go to test the oven but remember, of course, that the power is out. In the freezer lies a few packages of meat that I’m still not sure if all my family will get food poisoning from. The meat section is more than a little lacking at any store, and aside from buying a live chicken out the passenger window of my car while trying to avoid pedestrians and tuk-tuks, or perhaps a random turkey or pigeon on a stick, I think I’ll pass on the meat tonight. I decide on trying to cook the beans. But of course, they are dried beans and I should have thought about soaking them before. Aha! I remember that I brought an insta-pot and feel a small sense of success that I thought to bring it. Of course, it doesn’t work in the plugs but there is one special transformer that allows me to plug it in. I get my willing husband to start the generator- thankful for that provision. Only to realize that the generator doesn’t power the plug that I need for the insta-pot. I guess the beans will soak overnight now.
So, that’s out.
By now it’s 4:20 and the children are already clamoring and melting down because they are hungry. I look again at the freezer to get inspired and realize that the fridge switch might have been hit before the power outage- all the freezer meat, which isn’t much, is all thawed. To the gas-powered stove, I go to try and make sense of it all. It looks like it will be pasta again. I start cooking the meat on a pan, painstakingly shelling the garlic and dicing it as I forgot to bring a garlic press and the tiny garlic here takes a million years to shell. The onion cupboard always makes me nervous because cockroaches might live in there and so I grab an onion and quickly shut the cupboard door. I cut up some onions, pray over the meat, and add the Italian spices I brought from home. I go to grab a pepper or something to add to the sauce but realize I forgot to rinse them in potassium permanganate. No time for that now. But the gas stove has run out of gas. After scrambling around to get a new tank attached and figured, by now the meat has become soggy and it’s 4:45.
As I go to fill a pot with filtered water that has taken hours to filter, I realize that I forgot to add more water in the top of the filter and there isn’t enough. I grab backpack water bottles, any other bottles of water I can find to fill the pot to cook the pasta in. I had hoped to do garlic bread for a small taste of home. Of course but the Blueband margarine in my cupboard still tastes weird and I am trying to decide if it’s worth taking a few small scrapings of the butter in the fridge that cost 10 dollars for a brick of. I decide it’s worth it and try putting the bread in the oven. The kids will love this! This might just resurrect dinner! But the oven won’t heat up beyond 50 degrees and so semi-stale bread slices with thin amounts of butter that are barely warmed up are the dinner that is provided.
And so, 5:30 comes. I am exhausted and frustrated and lay the dinner before the family half in the dark, because there is no power, and I watch my kids pick at it. Nothing really tastes the same. “I don’t like tomatoes,” says one child, “I want more parmesan” says another but the supply is dwindling down. “The meat tastes weird,” I think. All the while praying that it doesn’t cause the whole family to be up sick all night.
The meal ends with a quick glance at the kitchen which reminds me of the mountain of dishes that await and must be cleaned in the small sink: lunch box dishes, snack dishes… I pray there is enough water to wash them.
Just an average Malawian dinner and an explanation of why my enjoyment of cooking is slowly diminishing.
**If you have any vegetarian recipes or good ‘from scratch’ meals with simple ingredients- please send them along! The meat here is not reliable or very safe and so most of the time we need to cook vegetarian and from scratch. I need some good bean meal ideas!
[As an aside, cooking here is partly difficult because ‘western’ foods are so very pricey. Any products that are familiar to us are imported from South Africa or Europe and cost a fortune. Case in point, see below]:
Dairy products are a hard one. We love dairy, but can’t do much with it anymore. This small package of cheese, the cheapest local cheese option (which tastes more like plastic as the quality is not good) costs approximately $9 for 450 grams.
Butter is ridiculous. A little more than a pound of salted butter is $16. We’re stuck with margarine….
I was excited to find chocolate chips- but this tiny juice box size is over $5.
A bag of flour for baking, since baking needs to be done from scratch (there are no granola bars save for very expensive ones, muffin or cake mixes are beyond affordable etc) is approximately $9 for only 5 kg.
And even basic things like toilet paper- a package of only 9 rolls (only NINE ROLLS) is almost $7. That means Just under a dollar a roll. When you have 6 people in your house and 4 little kids, let me tell you, 9 rolls does not last long.
Time to ration the toilet paper, and save old newspapers like they used in the old days! lol. And maybe save used nose wiped kleenex, if you even have such a luxury…