Pizzaria!!!!

So I promised to tell you all about making dinner for my host family! Well lets just say that EVERYTHING is different here. No stoves, no ovens, no way of regulating temperature except for taking out coals or putting coals into the jiko that we have. Soo…. Yeah lets just say im not the best cook when im in America and I have all the modern conveniences… hahaha. So just keep that in mind while you are thinking about me cooking in Tanzania.

Alright, so a few weeks ago my group got together and we made guacamole. Oh my gosh best thing in the whole world! We had a few mishaps along the way. Like one of the avocados we were sold wasn’t really ripe yet, and the chips that we bought at the store weren’t potato chips… they were cassava chips. But you know it turned out all fine and dandy :)

So making guac put me in a cooking mood and I went back to my family and told them that I wanted to cook for them. They were SO excited. They asked me what I liked to eat in American and I told them pizza! Most defiantly pizza… wonderful full of cheese… oh so great. Anyway, they told me that I HAD to make pizza for them. Wonderful “american” food.

So my momma asked me what I needed and I set out on the wonderful journey of making pizza from complete scrach. Yeah that’s right, the dough, the sauce, everything. It totally helps that we have a great cook book that pretty much told me what to do. But still. Keep in mind where I am. Africa.

So the night before I am going to cook my momma comes and shows me that she bought everything that I was going to need for tomorrow! Yippee! And then I started to get nervous because I really have NO clue what im doing.

The day that I cook I come home and want to get started right away! I then remembered that we didn’t have a fridge and so the cheese had been sitting out all day. So I opened it and tasted it. It was alright, not the best that I have ever had but it didn’t seem bad. Hahah but apparently my host siblings have NEVER HAD CHEESE BEFORE! Yeah that’s a shocker. So I had my sister try it and she totally hated the cheese. But I had already started to make the dough so you know what… I just went with it. Not a huge deal. So I continue to cook and everything is actually going wonderful! When it comes to “bake” the pizza we just improvised by putting a cover over the pan and put some coals on top! A wonderful, not completely terrible oven!

Hahaha then we get to the table. And I give everyone a piece of the pizza. I served myself last and then just dug in. honestly, for my very first try making pizza and making it with things that I have never used before im not gonna lie… it was pretty good! Then I look up and I see everyone just looking at me. My momma was saying “mary this is good” and my host brother and our house boy were both really enjoying it. But my host sister and my two host girl cousins had the worst look I have ever seen on their faces! Hahahaha it was honestly so funny. I just burst out laughing and said “hampendi?” (you don’t like?) and they all smiled and just said “nzuri” (meaning good) but I could totally tell. They hated every second of putting that pizza in their mouths. Hahaha.

So then the next day my momma asks me to cook spaghetti for the family. Well I was going to make that from scrach as well but they bought noodles so basically they just wanted me to heat up the noodles for them. But I decided to cook sauce because the pizza came out so good and because the girls hated it, I wanted to show them that I could make something that they would like.

But I got really carried away when I started and I totally messed everything up and I put WAY too much garlic into it. Needless to say it was SO GROSS. I tried to have my momma not put it on the table (they pretty much cooked an entire other meal as well so they didn’t need my gross sauce) but she said that it couldn’t be that bad and put it on the table. No one really took any except my host brother. He put TONS on his spaghetti and then took a huge bit. And I thought he was going to throw up! Hahahaha I just burst out laughing and was like I know I tried to tell you!

So needless to say that my host sisters still think that I cant really cook. Hahaha oh well. My momma is wonderful and even though it sucked she still was all smiles and encouraging.

But after everything, if I can make a pretty dang good pizza in the middle of Africa im thinking that I should just open a pizza shop when I get back. Im just that good :)

Ps. One thing that I LOVE about my host momma is how happy she is when I start speaking Swahili. you can totally tell that she asks me a question just so that I can try to answer her in my not quite complete Swahili. Im quite sure that she doesn’t really care about the answer half the time. Because her face is semi-serious when she asks the question and the moment that I start to break out the Swahili you can see the smile start to curve around her mouth and by the time im done with what im was trying to say she has a full blown smile. It really makes me want to keep talking :)