Sukuma Wiki

When we (Faders and McLaughlins, who are enjoying being together in Ann Arbor this week) told the kids the other day that we were having sukuma wiki for dinner, there was a loud outcry of cheering.

Sukuma wiki is a classic Kenyan dish of chopped greens cooked with salty spices. The greens grow year-round in thousands of gardens in Kenya, and they look like this:We had bushels of this stuff growing at Tenwek. The closest vegetable that we can find in Ann Arbor is kale. So we chop up the kale in small strips and then cook it with onions, tomatoes, turmeric, fennel seed, cumin, ginger, coriander, and a few other spices, and it actually tastes really good!

Sukuma wiki translates to "push the week." It goes by this name because eating sukuma wiki (which costs almost nothing in rural Kenya) can push a family though a week on a small food budget.
In Kenyan fashion, we eat sukuma wiki with chapati, beans, and ugali. Jason has mastered the preparation of this meal (which requires no silverware!). He orchestrated the preparation of the dinner below so that we could share Kenyan cuisine with some friends last weekend. Yum!