Prawns!

Ryan:

Though all 4 of Teizeen’s grandparents resided in Kenya for most of their lives, her grandfather (on her mom’s side) was part of a particularly expansive and noteworthy family unit consisting of 13 brothers and sisters. They grew up and married in Kenya, had many more kids each who grew up, married and themselves had many more kids in Kenya (Teizeen’s generation), some of whom already have kids of their own (though not exclusively in Kenya anymore). Whether you were able to follow that or not, the point is that Teizeen’s family, especially on her grandfather’s side, is gigantic.

To that point we recently met a more distant strand of the family that resides in Kisumu - a pair of middle aged brothers, with white and graying beards respectively, named Shafiq and Maad. Teizeen herself is not even sure how they are related to each other, but she assures me that they are.

The two brothers run a cotton ginnery and live together, with their spouses and children, in a flat on top of the tallest building in Kisumu (which is 5 stories tall). Living on the top flat they have access to the rooftop where one can look over the entire city and beyond to Lake Victoria and an expanding panorama of dry flanking farmlands and brown boulder pocked mountainscapes. Yesterday, Shafiq and Maad had us over for a rooftop cookout where we ate prawns in perfectly mild t-shirt weather until 1:00 in the morning.

Shafique was doing the cooking and the equipment consisted of the following:

(1) Propane tank: similar in size and shape to those used on BBQ’s in the US
(2) Burner attachment & grill: reminiscent of the old oversized Coleman camp stoves
(3) Cooking pan: a giant (at least 24” in diameter) “wok” shaped steel tilling blade that Shafiq removed from one of his tractors - this is where the magic happened.

Shafiq’s shrimp cooking procedure:

(1) Pour enough oil into the pan to fill a cereal bowl
(2) add chopped onions & cook until clear
(3) slide onions out of oil to the edge of ginormous wok when done
(4) repeat steps 2 & 3 with a bunch of chopped garlic
(5) add lots of beef bacon & repeat step 3 when done
(6) add more oil, then add prawns
(7) mix in bacon, garlic, and onions from the edges and stir
(8) when the women aren’t looking, drop in 2-3 sticks of butter and hide it under the prawns
(9) Aggressively serve timid eaters first

This prawn cooking took place in two separate sessions, each taking about 45 minutes to complete. Sooooooooo bad for you yet sooooooooooo goooooooood! We ate chicken curry and drank sodas between sessions, so that, by the completion of the second round of prawns, we were totally stuffed and wondering how our bowels were going handle the next day. Then Shafiq started a new pan of oil and proceeded to describe the differences between the previous prawns and the ones he was going to cook in the next rounds (round’s 3)! Good lord! I can barely walk today!