COLUMN
TEXT
CHARITY KEITA
Spaghetti
Chinoise! … a
game changer
for me & I take
full credit for
inventing it.
W
hat was I thinking?
With everything
that I have on
my plate at the
moment I invited
my boss to dinner? What on earth
could have possessed me to do such
a thing? And to make it worse his
wife will be there too. Christelle is so
infinitely stuck up, all she ever wants
is to tell us how provincial our lives
are compared to the glamorous life
she left behind in Paris. I just wish
she’d stay at home with her precious
shitzu Mignon (dubbed Minion at the
office) and do her nails, or sext her
lover, or whatever it is that ex-pat
trophy wives are expected to do
these days.
Well, it’s done now. No point in
crying over spilled milk, or spilled
wine as the case may be. If only I
hadn’t knocked that glass of rose’
over Tim (the aforementioned boss)
at last Friday’s office party, then I
wouldn’t have found myself extolling
18.
MY LIFE
AS A
FOODIE
Where food lover Charity Keita is
faced with the daunting task of cooking
up something delicious for a dinner she
might not have planned could she have
avoided it.
the virtues of drinking rose’ on my
porch when the sun is setting and
the monkeys are hurling abuse from
the trees at Tyrion, my adorable
rotweiller. And maybe if I hadn’t
had a couple of glasses of wine
before said spillage, I wouldn’t have
enthusiastically invited both boss
and charming wife for dinner, so they
too could enjoy the precious scene.
I have precisely twenty minutes
to get to the fishmonger before it
closes. Luckily for me I stored the
number of Aloha Foods, Nairobi’s
best fishmonger, last time I dropped
by. This means that I had the
foresight yesterday to call in and
place an order, which means that
I won’t have to select some old
glazey-eyed red snapper that no
one else has wanted all day, but
instead have four dozen Kilifi oysters
(20 bob each, shucked. Who can
complain?) and half a kilo of Malindi
prawns waiting on ice.
Back at home, I’m busy grating
copious amounts of ginger and garlic,
the cornerstone of my famous dish:
Spaghetti Chinoise! This dish has
been a game changer for me and I
take full credit for inventing it. The
idea popped up one day when I was
staying at North Coast with my fiancé
(then boyfriend, but that’s another
story for another time) Luan, who
is Portuguese/Mozambican. The
concept is incredibly simple: surf and
turf with an oriental twist!
The secret to Spaghetti Chinoise is
to cook all the ingredients separately
and then combine them at the end
with a cubed ripe avocado (don’t
mush it up too much, it messes
with the consistency of the sauce).
Basically what you do is first
caramelise the garlic and ginger and
set them aside. Next you take some
pork or beef mince and fry it until it
is almost crunchy (I add a bit of fish
sauce and soy sauce for moisture at
the beginning). Next take the shrimp
and stir fry them on a high flame with
a bit of sesame oil. At this point your
spaghetti should have been thrown
in the large pot of boiling salted
water. When the spaghetti is almost
done, stick the reserved ingredients
back into the pan, mix them up
properly and then once the spaghetti
has been drained, stick it all in a bi
pot with the avocado thrown in last.
Easy, no?
In the end even Christelle couldn’t
say no to a second helping of
spaghetti. And that was after she’d
wolfed down almost twenty oysters.
Luan is launching into a conversation
with Tim about why ISIL is in fact
more fundamentalist than IS, which
for me signals it’s time to clear up.
I thought it was going to be
a torture but in the end I even
managed to squeeze a few words out
of Christelle who, poor soul, isn’t that
bad after all. Not bad for a dinner I
whipped up in half an hour!