Cooking and eating

My day usually begins at 7 AM.  I cook for the seven US volunteers that are at the orphanage.  Breakfast is usually eggs or french toast, because there are over 100 chickens on the site and we get a lot of eggs.  Sometimes we have sausage, cereal, or potato cakes made from the leftover mashed potatoes of the previous night.  I also fix lunch for the volunteers.  It is often leftovers from the night before, but also I make egg salad (remember the chickens) or fried egg sandwiches.  Sometimes we have lunch meat for sandwiches - polony (not bologna).  I also make potato salad out of leftover mashed potatoes (with eggs, of course). The mashed potatoes here are very stiff, and they make pretty good potato salad.
The reason that I cook is that we do not want to cause any extra work for the staff here.  There are two kitchens.  In the morning one cooks for the school age children and the other cooks for the babies and preschoolers.  (That is the kitchen that I use.)  You never know what people are doing at lunchtime, so I cook then as well.  There is a cook who for the evening meal because all the children are at home and so we eat out of the main kitchen as well.  However, there is one staff member that spoils us, and when the kitchen is cooking something that she knows we don't like, she will cook something else for us. In addition to what they cook, I might also slice tomatoes or make guacamole, or slice fresh pineapples or magoes.  We also usually have bananas on hand.  We eat chicken and mincement (ground beef).  Occasionally they get meat from the butchery, but it is so tough and grisley, that I usually pass.  In general, I have not found much that I do not want to eat.  With the exception of ugali.  Ugali is like a cornmeal mush that is cooked dry so that it is stiff (looks like a cake).  There is no salt, seasoning, oil or anything with it, and I find it tasteless. For Kenyans, it is a favorite comfort food.  We eat a lot of rice and potatoes.  They grow their own potatoes, but they grow three crops of potatoes a year.  Bottom line, the potatoes don't get very big.  The real bottom line is that it takes a long time to peel small potatoes.  Even if I do not fix the evening meal, sometimes I help them peel potatoes.
It is interesting that there are a lot of similarities between Kenyan and Mexican food.  For example, here they make chipatis, which is like a thick flour tortilla, maybe a little sweeter.  Also there is cilantro in the garden.  Eat your heart out, Steff.  A rare treat is simosas, a deep fried tortilla like dough stuffed with ground beef.  They are very labor intensive, but oh, so good.  Also they raise a lot of cabbages, and kale.  The corn they raise is maize, tough, not like sweet corn.  It is cooked a long time. Many of their dishes are like stews - different vegetables, with rice or potatoes, maybe chicken, maybe not.  One dish meals.  Kenyans don't eat sweets very much.  But Jane does make us banana bread sometimes, and once I made a banana pudding (and yes, I did make the bread pudding.)    
Since I use the toddler kitchen, we wash the toddlers' dishes, as well as our own.  Of course, I try to wash as I am preparing the food too.  The volunteers take turns doing the dishes, but some do a lot more than others.  Steve helps out a lot.  All this is to say, I spend a lot of my time in the kitchen. One Sunday I announced that I was not cooking supper, everybody was on their own, and they readily agreed.  I don't know what the toddlers ate that evening but there was a TON of dishes.  So much for my night off.
In a couple of week there will be a team of six coming, and shortly thereafter, a team of four.  I will probably  cook breakfast for everybody.  When extra people come, it really puts a load on the staff, and believe me, they already have their hands full.