November 23rd - learning to make sambusas

I mentioned my love of the sambusa in an earlier post....this delight is a savory little pie that is filled with meat or veggies or in Manow, a small cooked potato....delish.....Having been told by Martin that Jane Mpayo made the best sambusa's in the area, I asked her to make some for our open house.  I also asked if she would be willing to show me how she does it....she agreed.

We agreed that I would go to her house today and I could help with the ones she was making for us.  Tine and I went over and began the process. I probably do not have to remind you readers that a Tanzania kitchen is not what we might be accustomed to.....for a big project like this the living area is taken over so there will be enough room.  I brought a knife and when I arrived, Jane handed me an onion and demonstrated the way you dice it up against your chest without a cutting board....having no confidence that I could accomplish that without severe bodily injury and a lot of blood, I asked Tine to go back to the house and bring a cutting board.  This was the first cause for hilarity.....I was once again proving myself to be entirely incompetent!  Yikes......anyhoo....I chopped the onion and Tine chopped the carrots and Jane cut up the meat and made a fresh ginger and garlic paste to cook with the meat....

Of course there was no power so Jane was doing all this on charcoal stoves outside the house.....

My first assignment....don't think its easy chopping onions on a cutting board on your lap!

The next step is to grind the meat.....I should have suspected something when Jane came out and said...."Mama Jane you need to help....we need power."  Hmmmm what was the giveaway?  I jumped up and went in to find a 1950's style meat grinder attached to a small table very close to the floor.....my instruction was "grind it".....

Do not be fooled by the photo - the blurring is not caused by the speed of the grinding but of the trembling of my hand....I could barely move it!

It got worse!

What you can't see is Neema rolling on the couch laughing as I try to do this.  I thought she was my friend but apparently no one can resist tricking the newbie into trying to grind the meat.  What is important to understand is meat in Manow is not the aged and marbled meat we see at Fred Meyer or Safeway....but rather the meat of real working cattle - tough and stringy.  We finally had to call Martin away from his football game....a huge deal for him....to have him do the grinding.  I will be using the food processor without a doubt. 

Once the meat is cooked and ground very finely the cooked onion bits are added and finally the carrot but those are not cooked which gives Jane's sambusa's a nice crunch.....

Next you make the wrappers - and that process is long and arduous...first you make the batter for chapatti - flour and water - no salt because you have salted the meat and the onions.  No recipe for this you just pour in some flour and add water until it is right.  Then you divide the dough into eight sections, then it gets hazy for me since by this time in the process I knew I would be using wonton wrappers....but somehow you put 2 pieces together with some oil between them and roll them extremely thin, cut into 4 sections then huzzah you have 8 wrappers and so on....then you take the large end of each section and fold it securing it with "goo" [flour and water] and stuff it full of the meat mixture.  Then deep fry in the pot of oil you have heated on the charcoal stove which is outside the house where it has now started raining.  This is the point in the process where Jane says to me...."I think you have been here long enough".  In other words - please leave so I can actually get this done before the sun rises! 

Another amazing display of the fortitude and creativity of women in Tanzania and other countries where they have to do so much to get even dinner on the table and have to be ready at any time to move everything outside to the charcoal stove.  It is fun for us but I am sure it is not always fun for them. 

Just to top off the story the sambusa's were delicious and Jane also baked a delicious tea cake with raisins - on the charcoal stove - and brought it to the open house.  We ate it all and it was perfect.  She is my cooking hero.