*For those of you who don’t know of Kooky’s latest adventure in Tanzania check out “He’s alive” and “Good Bye Kooky“. They should bring you up to speed.*
How is the food in Tanzania? It is dumbfounding to me that it hasn’t conquered the world like italian or chinese food. One word comes to mind, amazing. The best part about Tanzanian cuisine is you can loose weight if you stick to the diet, even if you eat all you can. I have lost between five and ten pounds. Please note that this only applies to men and all the weight lost will be muscle, not fat.
The base of the food is ugali which is boiled corn flour. It has the consistency of play dough and tastes like what you would imagine. It is served for most meals aside from breakfast. To eat ugali you break a ball off with your RIGHT HAND. This is very important cause your left is the hand you wipe your butt with, also they don’t use toilet paper and normally no soap… You then take this ball of vaguely corn flavored dough and try to pick up beans and greens that have been cooked until they loose their ability to be solid. You might get lucky and have some additional protein for dinner which could be one of a few things:
I did a google image search for Ugali and every picture pretty much looked like this. Looks like a giant ball of masa. YUM!
First we have daga which are little dried fish that are salted. They are about the length of your pinky. If you walk within 40 ft of a pile of daga at the market you will know recognize it quite steadily. Daga, as I have seen it are usually served in a tomato based sauce. You could have fried fish. These aren’t battered and fried pieces of cod or other nice white fish, it is river fish that have been fried whole until the thing is crispy, even the meat. Tanzanians eat the whole thing, scales, bones, fins, guts and all.
A pile of Daga at a Tanzania market.
In the world of poultry we have the ever present chicken. It is as fresh as you can get it right out of the back yard. these are gnarly chickens they are not the fat happy ones you might see over the fence of your neighborhood hipster. These chickens are fighting each while sifting through cow shit in search of worms or running like hell to not get raped by a rooster. They are also fried until thoroughly crisped. The head and liver are usually reserved for guest.
Next we have red meat. I have had beef for the first time in my life over here and those of you who say I don’t know what I am missing, now I know, and I don’t regret not eating it for 25 years. Goat is delicious. Half the joy I get out of watching baby goats romp and play is knowing they are going to be dinner one day and it will be amazing. The cuts of meat Tanzanians like are the gristly ones. The other day I got the sirloin of a cow and the butcher looked at me like I was crazy. Ribs, joints, and gristle are the prime cuts over here. Karibu is choice meat. Goat and beef are usually stewed in a garlic and tomato broth and it is quite tasty, if not reminiscent of chewing on a tire with bits of bone it.
Breakfast usually is either vitambu which is rice cooked down until a paste and then fried. The other option is mandazi, which are like over cooked triangular doughnuts. These are not really drained out of the fat very well and are very greasy. They are typically served with delicious piping hot tea that has enough sugar in it to make a donkey walk out of it’s hooves.
Mandazi
They also love soda. America might be the second fattest nation, (thanks mexico for taking that torch) but Tanzanians diets are about on par with an American fast food diet nutritionally speaking.
If you wish to try a delicacy from the Tanga region where I was living, I am giving you the recipe for tambi, their version of pasta.
you will need:
1 package spaghetti
1/2 cup sunflower oil
1/2 cup sugar.
boil the pasta until it is just past al dente.
then add the oil and sugar.
June came and went with not a piece of writing here on SurfingRuinedMyLife.net. For that I must say I am sorry. I thought I would take a moment to explain myself a little bit. First off things have been a bit on the crazy side. Alright, when isn’t my life on the crazy or hectic side? Normally by July I have hit my stride of chilling on Uncle Sam’s nickel. That was exactly where I saw myself by now. Unfortunately my superiors at Westmont had other plans for my summer. While I would usually find myself living on the dole of unemployment with a little hustle and flow on the side I found myself stuck in the kitchen four days a week.
The Westmont Grind
Back in April I had been asked if I wanted to work May term hours. May term is a one month micro semester Westmont runs for it’s students. Like any institution of higher learning this means they compress classes into a short time period but still charge students the same amount of money per credit for the normal semester. The motherfucking business of education. “Hey come spend all your money and go into debt, then graduate with a useless degree and have to go work for minimum wage for some idiot like me”. The only difference is I too am a well educated idiot working way outside of my degree or education for way less money then I should. I think I just summed up every American from 22-35 at the moment. Ain’t this country grand. America land of the free only if your rich while the rest of us have become the in debt slave laborer. Sorry for the rant but it has been a while.
I did the math and realized if I worked all of May and saved the bulk of that money I could kick it on unemployment for the remainder of the summer and still have my “extravagant” or lack there of life style with out any change, unlike my usual summers where by August I am eating out of the trash and basically sucking dick for crack. Well maybe not that last part, but you get what I am saying. The fuckers stuck me on the morning shift meaning I had to get up at pretty much 5:30 every morning and leaving me forced to surf windy blown out shit in the afternoons. It was only temporary…or at least that is what I thought.
May term came and went and I began getting even more hours as an influx of camp and convention groups came in. Apparently Westmont whores out its campus to anyone willing to pay for it all summer long. This sort of makes me a prostitute for the institute I suppose. Whatever, dollar bills! I have been working about 25-40 hours a week, work depending since May. My schedule changes week to week which is certainly a pain in the ass. I still manage a surf everyday and am stacking some mean paper while flipping burgers.
Reaping the fruits of my labor. Your looking at a bacon double cheese burger for yours truly. You think I would feed the customer this well, as if. Yes that is a plastic plate on top of a 350 degree F flat top grill. Safety as always is my number one concern.
Also it looks like I may actually become the full blown sous chef this fall considering that our old sous chef and my fellow friend in suffering Geoffrey is taking off a few months for hand surgery due to old age. The guy is like 62 and been a war horse in the kitchen for over 40 years. I am bummed to see him go as I have been able to learn so much from him and he over the past six months has become sort of a mentor to me not to mention a great friend. Honestly I don’t really want his job. If I get impressed into it I am looking at twice the head ache, three times the responsibility, 100% more bull shit for if I am lucky $2 more an hour. Whooooooooooooooot!!!!!!!!! I am actually going to have a sit down with my general manager this week to see what is going on with the fall semester.
Catering
This was close to 150 salads for a wedding at some Hollywood directors 30 million dollar estate in Montecito.
Those of you who frequently read the surflog know all about most of everything I have written and will write in this blog. Basically I may not write blogs everyday or even monthly these days, but I do however write in my surflog, my online journal, daily. So if you have not discovered it yet give it a peruse every now and again. My boy Trevor recently became Executive Chef for a local catering company here in Santa Barbara. I will not disclose the company so as to not cause any problems that this blog so often does in my life when I name, names.
He asked me if I would help a brother out for a bit while he got on his feet there. At the moment I am currently his sous chef. I am a double sous. Always a fucking a bridesmaid and never a bride! On my days off I am stuck either at an event busting my ass or in his kitchen prepping for an event. Its a good learning experience and even more paper to stack. At this point I am doing the best I have monetarily in about eight years or so. Last night I took Heather out to dinner, where I proceeded to get sloshed and told her “MONEY IS NO OBJECT”. And you know what? It wasn’t…
Here we are at the Palace toasting to Trevor’s new found success
And we cooked up a surf and turf feast for the occasion. That is grilled tri tip, Grilled fresh local prawns, orzo and roasted vegetables, and goat cheese horse radish bruschetta
DING REPAIR
Look at the ghetto set up I have going here. My board is propped up by a cooler in the ally on the side of my building. I like to call what I do now guerrilla surf board repair.
It never fucking ends. Just when I think I am out I am always sucked back in. I don’t even have a space to repair boards. I literally glass boards in my bathroom and then sand them in the ally next to my building. Its a fucking pain in the ass and I hate it. Yet for some reason surf boards keep showing up at my house to be repaired. It’s true that I am always breaking my own boards and needing to fix those. I have four spares meaning I only really need to fix boards a few times a year when I have destroyed all four. Usually in that time period I end up getting a new one anyhow. My quiver is in reality a bunch of destroyed boards with one or two good ones.
People still show up at my house with dings. They hit me up on Facebook. “Hey so my boy said you fix dings…ummm can you help me out bro?” My own friends are constantly hitting me up to repair their boards. “Please Chris, don’t make me go to a surf shop, your the man”. I am the man who hates fixing surf boards. I even get phone calls on occasion from people in New Jersey who need a board fixed. WTF. It will never end will it?
Just in case you thought I was exaggerating. That is a surfboard about to be glassed IN MY MOTHER FUCKING BATHROOM!!!!!!
Surfing
I have actually been surfing up a storm. Jalama has been the best it has been in ten years. The kelp is good, the sand is decent and there have been waves thus I have been staying wet. A normal day for me goes like this. I wake up a 5:30am, go to work and make food for about eight hours. Then I get off at around 3 pm, meet whomever hit me up first at my apartment to go up north with me. I only take one person and its first come first serve, no nepotism. Read The Rule of Two blog for more on my philosophy on that.
I change out of my work clothes, load up the car and shove off on the hour or so drive to Jalama. When we get there its not over, oh no. There is about another 25 minutes of walking on the beach to get to the spot, maybe further, swell and crowd depending. Then we surf for two hours, make the walk back, followed by the drive. If I am with Trevor we always stop at Denny’s in Goleta for a post surf dinner. If it is a party night then my day is not over. I come home, take shower, suit up and cruise to the Wild Cat. As you can see by this account of my day to day there is not very much time for blogging. I managed a perfect month back in May surfing every single day of the month 31 sessions in 31 days and a few doubles as well. I don’t think I have accomplished such a feat since I lived in New Zealand. It was fucking exhausting and I surfed all sorts of garbage in all sorts of dumb crowds. You can read the May surflog to find out all about that one. Basically I have found a renewed love for surfing and my performance is off the charts. I may be surfing better right now then I have ever surfed in my life. Maybe I will write something about the perfect month here if I ever find some time.
I guess that pretty much should bring everyone up to speed on what has been happening in Lisanti Land. Heather and I are still together. Even I don’t understand how or why that is. At the moment it is actually going along at steady calm. Whether or not I am doing the right thing for me or her is yet to be seen. Just as I felt at the beginning I still feel now completely uncertain and confused. Then again who really gives a fuck anyway cause at least I am surfing every day.
My cooking partner in crime Calvin finally moved back out to Santa Barbara and is currently living on the couch here at the Palace. Where would I be with out a guy on the couch? Him and I are in the process of the early stages of planning that Italian restaurant I always talk about opening. He moved here with the intention of getting this place off the ground with me. With any luck our goal is the try and open it by July of next year. Lets keep our fingers crossed. Expect to hear more on this from time to time as it begins to consume my life.
Here is some homemade potato gnocchi in a meat sauce to get your mouth watering. This is just a taste of what I will be serving up at my restaurant.
What can you look forward to here on SurfingRuinedMyLife.net? Kooky actually wrote a Kooky’s Korner for me to publish. Of course this happened about a month ago or so, but my lazy ass never got around to publish it. Since I have not heard from him since he may be dead in Tanzania right now, though he will live on here on the blog. Nick the Kook was nice enough to write some of his recent adventures in Chile. He wrote these like two months ago and I never posted it. I am sure at some point I will rant about some bull shit like how I got a pimple on my right ass cheek and now it hurts every time I sit down to take a shit (that has not happened). There you have it, the last 45 days or so in my life. Glad you still decide to read the trash I put out here. Bye bye for now…
Calvin, Mark and I doing some R & D for the restaurant at the Wild Cat.
Surfing Ruined My Life 