What to Do With Winter
Squash
Thank you, Tanzania!
By Lindsay Sterling
Over green smoothies upstairs at
the Public Market House, I asked Iman Lipumba, a 22-year-old photographer and
writer from Tanzania, if she’d teach me how to cook her favorite dish from
home.
“I don’t really know how to cook,” she
confessed. “In Tanzania, it’s common for most middle class, working families to
have a cook. For someone to come every day and cook, clean, and do laundry, you
would pay the equivalent of $30 a month.”
Iman’s family’s housekeeper, Celina,
grew up in a rural village where she had to walk an hour and a half to school.
When Celina’s father left her family with no income, she quit school to make
money as a live-in housekeeper in the city of Dar es Salaam. Iman’s family is
encouraging her to finish high school while working.
When Iman was growing up in
Tanzania, she did spend some time helping her housekeeper in the kitchen. “Making coconut milk
used to be my job,” Iman recalled. “I used a mbuzi. It’s like a short stool you sit on. At the edge of it is a
circular piece of metal with sharp edges and you use it to scrape the coconut
meat out of the coconut. Then you soak the coconut [meat] in water, massage it with
your hands, and let it sit for a couple hours before you strain it.”
Iman and I decided
to learn together how to cook two of her family’s regular dishes by using a new
cookbook that had crossed my desk: A
Taste of Tanzania: Modern Swahili Recipes from the West, by Miriam R.
Kinunda. “Green bananas and beef is a staple,” Iman said, paging through the
cookbook in her West End apartment kitchen. “We’d eat it at least once a week.
It is a regional specialty in northern Tanzania where my mom is from.” We also decided
to make pumpkin with cardamom and coconut milk.
Kelly green bananas were
surprisingly easy to find at the supermarket. No such luck with Tanzanian
pumpkin. Miriam Kinunda thankfully noted in her recipe: “I find that pumpkins
in America are very mushy, so I use banana-squash or kabocha squash instead,
which is almost as starchy as the Tanzanian pumpkins.” We ended up using blue
hubbard squash, which worked great. Butternut would have been great, too.
Iman and I peeled the squash,
cleaned out the seeds, and cut the flesh into chunks about an inch wide. In a
large pot we cooked the onions with ginger and cardamom and then added coconut
milk, water, and the squash. We cooked it with the lid on until the squash was
tender. Before I took a bite, Iman noted that people at home sprinkle cinnamon
on top as a condiment. The result was creamy, sweet, and delicious.
For the beef and bananas, we boiled
bite-sized pieces of beef until tender. In a separate large pot we sautéed
onions with black pepper, cumin, fresh ginger, turmeric, garlic, and cilantro.
We added tomato paste, and fresh tomatoes, and let them cook down until they
disappeared. Then we added coconut milk, beef broth, cooked beef, and segments
of peeled green banana. The meal was comparable to meat and potato stew, but
with a creamy, peppery sauce. The green bananas were not banana-y or sweet at
all. They tasted like fingerling potatoes, so much so that you could fool
someone. I’m looking forward to doing just that. Banana-phobes, look out.
For the recipes, click at right. To see Iman’s recent documentary about her family's housekeeper, Celina, visit http://www.imanlipumba.com/celina.
Copyright Lindsay Sterling 2014
