Going With My Gut

Kenyan Goat Feast -- For Farewell Floyd: Food Blogging Event

Prologue:

• First things first. This is not going to be a pretty blog post. As a meat eater I decided it was important for me to experience something like this at some point, to see if I could face the reality of the process of getting meat to my plate. Vegetarians and animal lovers, proceed with caution.

• Thanks to Julia Parsons (A Slice of Cherry Pie) and James Brewer (Back to the Chopping Board) for coordinating this food blogging event to honour the late Keith Floyd. I was heartbroken when the original deadline passed and I had not yet gotten access to electricity and internet to post this while WWOOFing on Rusinga Island in West Kenya, but was delighted to see the deadline extension. Huzzah!

• This post is dedicated to my Dad, with whom I used to watch Keith Floyd's culinary adventures around the world. We'd always have a good chuckle at his "wing it and swig it" approach to cooking and life. I'd like to think that Dad watches me undertake my many a hare-brained adventure with a similar bemusement.

• Finally, this goat feast was very much a team effort. Thanks to Michael Odula for helping us source the goat, Samuel Odula for showing Babs how to kill it with minimal suffering, our fellow volunteers Dan and Cyrill for first raising the idea, co-financing this whopping 1,500 Kenyan shilling (~£13) enterprise, and being amazing comrades-in-arms throughout our stint. Finally thanks to the kids -- Michael Jr, Tanya, Gloria et al for being fabulous team players on the day.

So. Our fellow WWOOFer Dan walks into our living room on Rusinga Island in West Kenya one day and says "Hey I heard these WWOOFers back in July bought a whole goat and BBQed it. Are you interested in us pitching in to get one too?"

I say "YES", probably about as fast as I said yes when Babs proposed. Just possibly a wee bit faster.

And then Babs ups the ante (as he does): "Yes, but only if we buy a live goat and I get to kill the goat myself."

The week leading up to feast day was surprisingly unhyped. We simply agreed on a budget for a medium-sized goat and our homestay host Michael Odula spent a morning and an afternoon asking around if anyone in the neighbourhood had a goat from their flock for sale. He appointed his youngest son Samuel to help us through the kill.

D-Day. Our goat had arrives before breakfast. We went out to find it chilling out and snacking on a bush. Samuel reckons it weighs about 50kg. I get Babs to pose next to it for perspective.

Samuel takes the goat out to a stone plateau behind the Odula house and trusses it up. Under his guidance, Babs cuts deep into the goat's throat with Dan's camping knife. The key thing here is to cut right through the jugular. It's a steady hand and a sharp blade, and the goat stops moving in less than 3 minutes. There's less of a blood spurt than we expected.

Being behind the camera provides a strange sense of detachment but it's still a fairly intense experience watching my first food-animal kill. I wasn't sure if I would feel nauseous (I didn't) or feel huge pangs of guilt (I didn't either, given the goat had lived outdoors all its life, had a quick death, and we were damn well going to eat it nose to tail.)

It could have been scarier. Had we been with a more traditional tribe, they would have cut a pouch of skin under the goat's neck to catch the blood, then drink it as part of the ritual. I'm not ready to go that native.

A moment of solemn silence, and then Babs unties the goat in preparation for the next task...

...Skinning it. This requires some help from Michael Jr (back) and a neighbour (front) to hold up the legs while gentle but firm slits are made down the middle of the belly and down each leg.

Next, the shoulders are removed at the joints -- surprisingly easily, says Babs.

And now to remove the belly flap. This is to be done with great care so as not to puncture the stomach and contaminate the meat with half-digested stomach contents.

Samuel removes the guts into one neat pile.

Samuel and Babs section the ribs and joint the legs.

A neighbourhood dog gets a treat of spleen, lungs and kidneys. Later I remove the hooves and he comes back for those. He proceeds to follow me around for the rest of the day...hoping.

Samuel and Babs do the initial round of cleaning out half-digested greens from the small intestines. There's a lot of it. The smell, while not knock-you-out overpowering, is distinct and sticks in your head. Now I can always smell a goat (or their poop) that's anywhere in a 10m radius.

And now to empty out and scrape clean(ish) the stomach....all 4 of them.

Samuel and Babs wash and scrape fat from the goatskin, then nail it as high as they can on a nearby tree in the hope that the dogs won't get to it overnight. Idiotically we forgot this when we left -- we've asked Cyrill to wear it home to Frankfurt as a cape or something. Very Heart of Darkness, no?

Mama Odula panfries the liver for lunch on her charcoal cooker. She also stews whatever goat meat bits that won't be used for the nyama choma (Kenyan-style BBQ) dinner. The stomach and guts need a long hard soak and scrub before they'll be ready for cooking.

After lunch I get down to marinading the legs and ribs. Am keeping it simple as Floyd would have done. Wash the meat thoroughly. Place in basin. Pour Coca Cola into basin to tenderise the meat. Swig the rest of the bottle. This cooking with Coke business amuses the kids to no end. Floyd might have used local Tusker beer instead, but there was none available at our neighbourhood trading post.

Anyway, back to it. Divide 4-6 large garlic cloves into thick slices, make deep incisions in the legs, and stuff the garlic into the slits. Rub a generous amount of Royco mchuzi mix, the ubiquitous food seasoning found in these parts... Royco is a Unilever powdered concoction of constarch, salt, sugar, coriander cinnamon, fennel seeds, tumeric, ginger, garlic, cumin, methee seeds, flavour enhancers -- must be MSG I reckon -- and permitted food colouring, whatever that is.

I rope in Tanya to wave away the flies while the meat soaks.

Dan and Babs dig a hole for the fire in our "front yard" and pile up twigs and branches by size. We use dried corn cobs and corn hairs for firestarters. Not that I've ever had one, but I absolutely cannot ever go back to gas BBQ grills after this.

Waiting impatiently for the fire to reach optimum heat...

And away we go! 30 minutes of grilling, turning and basting...

And then, perfection.

Samuel was quite keen about grilling the goat's testicles...unfortunately due to the coarseness of the grill mesh Samuel accidentally dropped both into the flames while cooking them. He was quite despondent.

In the Odula living-cum-dining room, Babs carves up the legs, and Mama Odula brings in the matumbo: chopped up stomach and braided intestines stewed for hours in cooking fat, tomatoes and onions (and Royco I'm sure, judging by the colour). I try a little for my honour's sake, but it holds too strong a taste and smell of grass-half-digested-in-stomach-juices for me. Babs digs it though, having grown up with innards curry.

Gloria's had enough talk! It's time to chow down. Strictly traditional nyama choma doesn't use any wussy stuff like marinade, so our garlic adds a fabulously novel infusion to the meat.

The ribs -- between the Royco and the slow fire -- are deliciously smoky. The bits between the ribs could definitely work as a jerky snack.

Mama Odula is well impressed at how tender we've kept the meat. Mr Odula asks Babs if he's ever worked in a restaurant or a hotel.

We nearly choke on our goat laughing, but we're pleased at the compliment.

More importantly, we hope we've done the goat -- and Floyd -- justice today. A toast (of Coke) to both.

October - Kenya

By Babs

We flew to Nairobi on the 1st of October from Cairo, and stayed a couple of nights in a banda at Upper Hill Campsite in a suburb of Nairobi (ironically not Upper Hill, since they moved from there).

[banda pic to come when I can get power for my camera!]

While there, we signed up for a 4 day safari with Big Time Safaris which would take us to the Masai Mara National Reserve and Lake Nakuru National Park. The safari wasn't cheap, but we bargained it down to $100 per day (still well over our budget!) which is not too bad since the Kenya Wildlife Service charges foreigners $60 a day to visit its top rated parks and the safari includes food, transport and accommodation.



We saw an incredible number of animals at both parks.

At the Masai Mara we saw: cheetahs, antelopes, Jackson gazelles, lions, elephants, giraffes, zebra, wildebeest, hippos, crocodiles, gnus, warthogs, eagles, hyenas, jackals, maribu storks and no doubt about 100 other species that I didn't identify or have forgotten already.


Lions

Buffalo

Wabs standing either side of the Kenya-Tanzania border in the Masai MAra

Lake Nakuru was full of flamingos - it's a soda lake which a large (2 million) population of flamingos migrates to every year. We also saw white rhinos and baboons, in addition to some species which we'd already seen at the Masai Mara.

We had our safari drop us off at Nakuru town, where we stayed a couple of days, before going to Kisumu (3rd largest town in Kenya) for two nights, then getting the bus and ferry to Rusinga Island where we started our two week volunteering stint just over a week ago. We're teaching assistants at a nursery school in the mornings and working at a permaculture demonstration project in the afternoon, which is all fun, if easy work, and we're experiencing genuine rural developing country life - ie, no electricity or running water, which is trying our paitence somewhat! Only 5 days to go though!

Empire of the Sun in London: Dinings, Cafe Japan and Atari-ya

If you've been to Japan, you might agree that the apex of its charm and allure is how it manages to have both age-old traditions and cutting-edge modernity co-exist vibrantly, neither falling into the shadow of the other. It's the kimono-clad geisha on her mobile phone with enough features to control satellites. It's the businessmen who dine at sushi and noodle parlours that have cooking methods that go back centuries, who then proceed to karaoke clubs with control panels more complex than Captain Kirk's SS Enterprise.

Fittingly, I have two favourite Japanese restaurants in London, and try as I might, I can't choose either one over the other.

 

New School: Dinings

For a wildly succesful example of avant garde Japanese cuisine that is a knockout on both beauty and bite, go to Dinings, helmed by Nobu alum Tomanari Chiba.

It was my friend from work Macaloony who first brought me here. She loves Dinings to the extent that she made me promise not to tell anyone where we were going, and storms around the office like a Kabuki demon every time there's a rave review about the place in one of the London papers, cursing at what it'll do to her already strained ability to get a table at short notice.

It's possible she'll disown me or at least disinvite me to her upcoming wedding upon reading this post, but let's face it, by this point I'm nowhere near being the flag-planter and early loudhailer for Dinings.

Ah well, at least we'll always have that farewell dinner this past summer. Good girly times.

Fabulous fish: Seabass carpaccio with summer truffle and ponzu (citrus juice) jelly; Mackeral sushi...made with...egg fried rice?

 

 

Meat that melts in your mouth while you melt in your knees: Stewed pork belly (Iberian pate negra, if you're lucky); and wagyu beef sushi, also with ponzu jelly.

 

 

If you're not watchful, a session at Dinings can quickly turn into a protein and carb fest. The fruit and vegetable balancers are not to be ignored. I'm a big fan of the beetroot, and avocado...a great cover for the razor clams underneath.

 

 

Right. Veggie guilt taken care of. Now for main event.

Foie gras sushi.

I'm not otherwise much of a foie gras fan. It's too rich even for me, and sometimes has too much of a raw livery smell. Combined with humble sushi rice to soak up its richness, however, is clearly one of those loud "Eureka" moments in the kitchen lab.

And then, the encore! Trump the foie gras sushi, by adding unagi (grilled eel) and shaved truffles.

The less innocent among you will know that Japanese porn does nothing in moderation. This evidently extends to the food porn genre. The foie-gras-unagi-truffle sushi orgy leaves you in a puddle of pleasure and with a vague sense of guilt after.

 

 

Old School: Cafe Japan

For a traditional hole-in-the-wall experience, go to Cafe Japan on Finchley Road, right by the Golders Green tube station.

Go on a rainy day (and given it's London, there will be many) and slurp up a steaming cauldron of nabeyaki udon. Go at lunch time (because there is never any left by dinner time), and pick at a grilled yellow tail collar, oozing in its own luxurious fish oils. Go at dinner time (because it's brought out only then) and order a slab of grilled butter fish. Go any time, sit at the bar, and have the chef build you a sushi or sashimi platter.

Go twice in the same day, ditching a rainy and muddy jazz concert at Hampstead House in between, much to the disbelief, amusement and slight envy of your more stubborn friends, scrunched between their mats and umbrellas, less willing to cut their losses.

The only disjointed detail in the lways-blissful experience at Cafe Japan is hearing the chef talk to his helpers in English -- because they speak Mandarin otherwise -- but the quality of the food will keep you sufficiently zen to not really care.

 

Home School: Atari-ya

For the DIY cuisine crew among you, may I suggestAtari-ya, a tipoff from kopibren and Silas. Atari-ya's sushi from their tiny James St Counter is fabulous and good value for money, but the metallic cafe tables and flourescent lights just doesn't cut it for me for atmosphere (and I'm not one to usually harp on about atmosphere while I'm eating).

Much more fun to buy sashimi sliced from giant market-counter slabs, from their larger markets in Finchley or West Acton. If you already know how, you can also buy rice and other relevant sushi and miso soup apparatus and make it all at home. If you don't, all you need is some soy sauce and ready-mixed wasabi for a sashimi feast at home.

 

Dinings
22 Harcourt Street
London W1H 4HH, UK
+44 20 7723 0666

Cafe Japan
626 Finchley Road
London NW11 7RR, UK
+44 20 8455 6854 

The Thais That Bind at Khao San, London

"Here at Khao San we serve only Thai food. We no serve fusion food. Fusion food is confusion food. Here at Khao San we no like to confuse our customers."

So said Pan, the lovely chatty owner of Khao San Thai Restaurant in London, on my first visit to her restaurant, about a year ago now.

With the utterance of Pan's better-than-fiction quip, I knew right away that after 2 years of searching, and tolerating watery curries in the Thai-only-in-concept kitchens above English pubs, and trying to make myself believe the decent but ultimately too-sugary and too-flashy concoctions of the Busaba Eathai chain, I had finally found my place in London to get my fixes for proper Thai food.

In the few months that followed, I was commuting weekly to the Netherlands for work. Babs and I fell into a Thursday night routine. He'd pick me up at Heathrow and I'd call Pan to say we'd be around in 20 minutes.

The order never varied greatly. 2 portions of tom yum seafood soup. Thai fishcakes. Morning glory fried with garlic and chilli. Pad Thai with seafood. Khao San house special noodle -- seafood dry-fried with a very thin rice noodle we Chinese call mee sua.

My joke after ordering, embarrasingly, never varied either: "But Babs, what are you going to eat?"

Above: Khao San's tom yum talay is my best-in-category find in London so far

Above: Khao San's fish cakes, and house special noodles made with mee sua

Khao San's tom yum soup especially -- with just the right level of fire and acidity from chili, ginger, lemongrass and lime, and without the over-sugariness at less authentic establishments (who use sugar to mitigate the heat) -- was always a great antidote to the week of work-canteen lunches, with alarmingly processed meat and soups made from flavoured powder.

Their morning glory was always a bright green, rather than the olive-y brown when an inexperienced cook has fried it too long. And the seafood mee sua was a tasty and lighter alternative to pad thai, which in some places can be too greasy and over-sauced.

If dining with friends at Khao San, eat family-style to try the more indulgent dishes such as their shredded green papaya or green mango salad with dried shrimp, curries (rich with coconut milk) and a whole fish steamed Thai style. Wash down with Thai ice-tea -- its slightly sickly sweetness (from using condensed milk) will help to manage the chili if needed. If in season, try Pan's baby pumpkins baked whole with custard for dessert.

And tell Pan I stopped dropping by not because I got confused, but because I got on the road. And I'll be back as soon as I can.

Khao San
108 Chepstow Road
London, W2 5QS, UK
+22 20 7221 9984

Picnic Lunch from Riga's Central Market

Conveniently located right by the train station and international bus terminal, the colourful Central Market in Riga, Latvia, is housed in 5 gigantic Zeppelin hangars, and all the sidewalks and side streets all around and in between.

Like the other large markets we visited in Central and Eastern Europe this past August (such as Dolac Market in Zagreb, Croatia, and Stary Kleparz Market in Krakow, Poland), there was a wealth of local and seasonal produce on display by large traders and small home-producers alike.

Its clients too were equally mixed, between leathery babushka-ed housewives with old-school wicker baskets, and a peppering of younger Latvians like this leggy brunette on the right.

The mood among the vendors here, however, swung more widely than at other markets. Several fruit and vegetable sellers shoved samples at us regardless of whether we were buying, while a few dour lady butchers in their token hair-bands (think doily tiaras rather than proper hairnets) waved me away upon seeing my camera.

No matter. It was all rich pickings for a pocket-friendly picnic lunch by the river (and as it turns out, breakfast the next day as well).

Yes please to some very pretty aboli -- a kind of minature apricot as far as I could tell. No thank you to some not-so-pretty bull's ballies.

Yes please to some house-soused pickles. This lovely lady cut us a wedge from every jar at her stall to try before she let us pick what we wanted. Turns out I like 'em half-pickled and Babs likes 'em fully pickled, but we're both fans of generous use of dill and garlic.

Like shooting fish in a barrel, so they say.

We pick up a couple of smoked mackeral fillets, a little bag of seaweed salad (at least I think that's what it was) and this amusing short loaf of "boomerang bread" to make a couple of hefty sandwiches.

Wash down with a cup of kvass, preferably bought on tap from a barrel in the back of a truck! Kvass --the Slavic fast-food drink of choice since ancient times -- is made from a fermentation of bread made from wheat, rye, or barley, and sometimes flavoured with fruit, berries, raisins or birch sap.

According to Wikipedia, kvass was first mentioned in Russia over a thousand years ago, and has always been a popular drink with the working class and the clergy. Right after the fall of communism in the early the likes of Coca Cola swept into the market. In the late 90s however, a huge kvass revival emerged, partly fuelled by regional patriotism and anti cola-nisation, knocking back Coke's market share in Latvia by some 20 percentage points!

Kvass appeals without any need for patriotism, really. It has a sweet malty yet refreshing taste that hasn't yet crossed over into booze territory. I'd like to say it tastes a bit like flat root beer or saspirilla, but have decided it's a taste unto itself. Maybe those of you out there who have tried it can suggest a better description or comparison!

I fall into a fun old picnic habit: sharing the last of my sandwich with the local duckies, and then looking around, half-jokingly wondering if anyone would notice if I bagged one or two for dinner. I feel yet another Goldmine craving coming on...

Anything But A Vanilla Sky in Vilnius

To Gurm with thanks, for reassuring me that I'm not crazy!

I couldn't stop staring at the sky in Vilnius. The clouds here don't just have personality, they have violent mood swings. At one glance it'd be a heart-(or at least balloon) lifting azure, like this view of artist colony Uzupis ...

... In another glance, it'd be that particular shade of grey that foretells some disaster or tragedy of divine proportions, like at the Archcathedral Basilica below.

I'm not sure if this was originally meant to be some kind of victorious or majestic pose, but the broody Baltic sky here makes this statue of the medieval King (I can't remember his name, apologies) of these parts look like he's about to sleepwalk off a precipice.

These changing tides of light and dark became for me a metaphor of the city's own story. Now better known as a happy-go-lucky party-hardy stag do venue, it wasn't so long ago that Vilnius went through a dark era purging just about all of their Jewish population during the Nazi campaign in World War II, then lost another good chunk of its inhabitants to Soviet progroms in the post-war years.

Below is another combination of images that reminded me of the dark history just below the city's light-hearted skin: On the left, newlyweds engrave their names and wedding date on locks and attach it to Uzupis Bridge for good matrimonial luck. On the right, on the outside walls of the Museum of Genocide Victims housed in the ex-local KGB HQ (2a Auku St), are the names and lifespans of those who are believed to have been executed by the KGB inside the building. The walls cover keep going over a heartbreaking amount of space, a good number of the individuals would have been only teenagers at the time.

Food Finds in Vilnius, Lithuania

The culinary highlight of our Vilnius visit back in mid August was without a doubt Restaurant Zemaiciai (mentioned in a standalone feature and my soupy roundup of Eastern Europe), which in my mind might just be the nirvana of tavern cuisine. But I thought to also quickly share a few other food finds if you're planning to visit.

Busi Trecias, which translates to "And You're The Third", is Vilnius's first microbrewery. It offers a plethora of flavoured beers while maintaining economies of scale, by ingeniously (or sneakily?) having just a light and a dark brew, then adding a shot of the appropriate syrup for the flavour ordered. We sampled honey, lime and pink grapefruit beer, and enjoyed all 3.

The food menu has dishes with enticing names like "Witch's Tears", which eventually translates to various well-flavoured combinations of meat and stodge. Babs did have, however, a lovely grilled whole trout.

Come to think of it, for all this talk of meat and stodge, Babs and I had plenty of fish in Vilnius. There was a lot of smoked and cured herring about, and it being the start of mushroom season, there were soused girolles aplenty to go with the fish. This particular dish below was the highlight for us at Chaplin Bar (yes, named after Charlie), which had an otherwise ho-hum menu.

Another good place for herring (and food in general) is Cozy, which manages to add a splash of flash and style without compromising on the quality and generosity of the food. Cozy's renditions of the usually unphotogenic pork and mash, and lasagne (below) aren't just pretty to look at, kudos to them. There's also free WIFI, and a DJ bar at night.

Busi Trecias (And You're The Third)
Totoriu g. 18
Vilnius, Lithuania
+37...

Chaplin Bar
Labdariv g. 7/11
Vilnius, Lithuania

Cozy
Dominikony g.10
01120 Vilnius, Lithuania
+37...