cooking – The Kafuro & Liss Blog

Ugandan meals and water melons

Good to hear about our friends at Liss who have been studying about our Ugandan meals and how we prepare.
Talking about water melons, this was a discussion by Primary Six class today in the morning. Water melons, tomatoes and onions are the main crops we are planting this season in our Kafuro gardens.
Water melons are very sweet and are thirst- curing crops.
Planting a water melon, we buy seedlings from the seed store ( packed seeds grow better than those we get from fruits and dry to be planted). We make a 2 feet by two feet ditch, we plant in four seeds of water melon when it’s our wet season like how it is becoming now. It takes four to seven days to germinate, then we care about directing them to different directions as the spacing in about one metre from one ditch to another, then spraying starts as they are very much attacked by pests.
At around two months and fifteen days (75 days) our best water melons are ready for harvesting and fresh to eat.

We are reminded to eat fruits after washing them clean

Talking about Muchomo, its so nice when made by an expert. We read about our teacher’s wife and family on making best muchomos in the region. They are based at New Life Safaris.

Wishing you all the best, keep us informed about the food you make.

written by Asasira Posiano

Ugandan – style food tasting

At Liss, as we approach the end of our Uganda topic, we set the children a design technology task – to plan and make a Ugandan – style meal. Before the children can do this, they have to taste Ugandan food. Mr Stanley was very busy in the Liss kitchen making the following:

Roast IRISH potatoes

Roast Sweet potatoes

Chapatis

Muchomos

Banana chips

Salad

Katchembali

The children tasted the food and had to complete an evaluation. The next step will be to plan and create their own Ugandan meals. We will report to you on their progress!

Ugandan style food tasting at Liss

As part of our focus on Uganda this term, children in Year 6 at Liss have been tasked with creating a Ugandan style meal. We have carried out some research on the internet; listened to Mr Stanley tell the pupils about some of the food he has eaten while visiting Uganda; and today we tasted some common foods that Mr Stanley has tasted in Uganda. We had to taste all of the foods band and write an evaluation form stating what we thought of the foods.

We tasted the following foods:

Plantain chips (Mr Stanley has bought these in Kasese)

Roast potatoes

Sweet potatoes (In UK these are an orange colour)

Salad of cabbage, onion, tomato & carrot

Katchembali (a salad of onion, green pepper, tomato and chilli – Mr Stanley left this out). Many thanks to Jackie at Tembo Canteen at Mweya for this recipe.

Chapati

Beef Muchomo (thanks to Ronnie Musabe for his special recipe with garlic and curry powder)

Feedback was generally very positive with the plantain chips, the muchomo and the roast potatoes very popular. We would like to ask our friends in Kafuro to discuss which UK foods they would like to taste.

Muhudi’s third day at Liss

Friday was another busy day for Muhudi. A full day of teaching at Liss was on the menu and this started with a cultural museum presentation to Classes KR and AS. The next two sessions were cooking rolex with the two aforementioned classes. Mr Stanley and Muhudi are so used to cooking rolex now that they are considering going into partnership and setting up a rolex stall in Katunguru.

Muhudi’s final session of the day at Liss was giving a talk about Islam to Class JA. Mrs Armstrong reported that the talk was brilliant and an hour wasn’t enough to answer all the questions the children had. Muhudi joined Film Club after school to watch The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and then went to visit Liss Scouts in the evening. Muhusi runs the scouts at Kafuro and he drilled the Liss scouts. There are some similarities in how the scouts operate in both countries, but a lot of differences also.

Tomorrow Muhudi will be visiting the sites in London.

Making sure the omelette is properly cooked

Cob Oven Cooking

In history, we have been learning about the Saxons. We found out that Saxons had ‘feasts’ and a typical food that would have been available were ‘Oat Cakes’. The Saxons would have had to use fire lit ‘ovens’ to bake their oat cakes. To have a real experience of this, we lit our own Cob Oven and had a go at making Saxon Oat cakes.

Whilst we were outside cooking, we had noticed that the pear trees in our school garden we full of delicious fruit! We harvested the pears and had a go at making them in to pear crumble.

Have a look at our photos. You can see what we thought of our Cob Oven fayre!

With the pears we had found in the garden, we made a pear crumble! Here we are doing our magic in the kitchen;

Cob Oven Cooking

On Monday, we used our cob oven to bake pizzas and garlic bread. We have been growing our own garlic over the past few months. It was now time to harvest some of it and learn how to use it in our baking. We prepared our pizzas and garlic bread in the kitchen, whilst Mr Haycock had lit the fire to warm up the cob oven. After lunch, the cob oven was hot enough and the fire had burned down to glowing embers, ready to put our pizzas in to bake. They only took a few minutes to bake which surprised us how fast the cob oven could cook our food.

Once we had finished all our cooking, we took our pizzas and garlic bread back to our classroom for the taste test! They were delicious. We thought about how we might choose different ingredients next time if we were to bake pizzas again. We wondered if our pizzas tasted all the better for being baked in our cob oven that we loved and enjoyed using so much!

Talking about the Weekend

Since our arrival on Friday, finding the temperature to be in Negative five from the Ugandan temperatures that were in 28 degrees Celsius.
We have been under good care and everybody was prepared for our arrival.
I am humbled to mention that Mr. and Mrs Negus (Andrew and Teresa) have done a great job to care for Yowasi who is living with them at the moment and also to mention is Rebecca and Ian Buckle who have taken care of our teacher Mrs Natumanya Molly.
Most interesting is that they constructed a new room for me and it is named after me since I am the first person to sleep and use the room.
That very room is called “Yowasi’s Suite” and they are printing a piece of marking to identify it as being special for me and can always use it whenever Yowasi is in England.

Back to what has been occurring,
Last Saturday was also another good day that we had to visit the park where we started with a tour around the park. Spruce and other weather resistant trees appeared green and the broad leaved trees appeared to be drying out due to the strong winter. it was really nice to be at the park only that they were hit by a storm that had to claim some tree. Afterwards we had a meeting at Bottom Cottage and had several things to eat.
On the menu my service was not put on the table and Yowasi had to gear up Adam his link teacher Liss Junior school to go in the kitchen while on a visit bring water for Yowasi as it was the only thing he needed to drink.
Molly as the co visitor had several cakes and tea, on chatting together with her co visitor then her comment was that the tea was very strong.

On Sunday morning, Yowasi was waken by the bells that went ding dong and so on in the village and Andrew said they were only inviting only the faithful to Church.
I had to get on doing the work that need the most experience and a good morning blessing when you do it right and that is making the Millet flour porridge.
It all went very well and I knew a good day was in front of me.

After porridge I had to join Andrew Negus who is a good story teller about the History of Portsmouth which is the best ever town in England where their Navy have done all sorts of Evil and Good to for the benefit of their country after long troubles of the Romans who gave England headache and then they were also English.
God saved them when unknown woman produced Nelson who used the Victory boat to have the French cleared and to be brief, England have had peace since then.
It only then concentrated on disturbing other countries copying the bad habits from France and Italy.
Out trip to Portsmouth really went very well having looked at different historical material in the history of England as a country
Hope to keep updating you briefly and then a lot to the children at Bukorwe and all our Twinned schools in Uganda

With special greetings from my country
Hope you enjoy reading the Blog

Mince Pies!

This week, we have been finding out about some Christmas traditions. We made some Mince Pies which is one of the traditions of Christmas in the UK. Did you know…….?

Mince pies became a regular part of Christmas celebrations as early as the 16th century (Tudor times), when mince pies were coffin or cradle shaped, rather than round as they are now. At that time, they contained quite a bit of shredded meat in addition to the usual melange of dried fruits.

The crusaders returned from the Holy Land with spices, and it was deemed appropriate to celebrate Christ’s birthday with a pie containing spices from his native land.

Important to add three spices!

It was important to add three spices (cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg) for the three gifts given to the Christ child by the Magi.

Mince pies should traditionally have a star on top, to represent the Christmas Star which some believe led the shepherds and Magi to the baby Jesus in Bethlehem.

Here are some photos of us baking our own mince pies. Can you guess who liked them and who didnt’?

Butternut Squash Soup

After our trip to Durleighmarsh Farm, we wanted to make something tasty with our Butternut Squash that we had bought back from the farm. We decided to make a tasty, warming soup;