Mandazi!!

It's amazing how a little cooking can be so completely relaxing for me (thank you Jesus that cooking is enjoyable to me!).  It has been a bit of a hectic day...one can always tell the state of my life by examining my purse.  When everything is organized and in it's place, one can assume that I'm balancing my time quite well and feeling good.  And then there's days like today, when the state of my purse goes beyond even Mary Poppins' carpet bag.  My friend Kelsey was trying to help me find my camera in my purse, but she became overwhelmed by the amount of stuff she was looking through.  She pulled out a few items before politely suggesting that maybe I should wash the flour off my hands and attempt to dig through everything to find it.  I literally dumped everything out and looked multiple times before retrieving it.  But I am now totally calm and at peace after my adventure preparing recipe #2 from the street food extravaganza book.  I chose to make mandazi, which is a familiar favorite from Kenya.  I first learned about mandazi back in 2008 from my friend Lyonne, who would prepare batches of it at the house where I was staying in Nairobi.  While I learned the Lyonne version, I never mastered the actual street vendor mandazi taste because the recipes were slightly different.  Clearly I've spent 4 years completely missing out on the true mandazi experience--until now. 

Mandazi is basically just fried dough: flour, sugar, baking powder, and a few spices, mixed together, rolled out and cut into triangles.  Then you fry them up in good old oil, and WaLa... you have mandazi.  It's less sweet than our sugary American donuts and funnel cakes but good just the same for it's simplicity.  There's no extra icing or powdered sugar involved.  One time I made the Lyonne version for my church during a presentation I gave about Kenya.  Much to my dismay, my mom insisted on dumping cinnamon and sugar all over the top of them to give them more taste.  Meanwhile I nearly had a meltdown as I complained that she was ruining their authenticness.  (By the way I love my mom dearly, and I'm basically a hypocrite because I've come to love smearing jam all over my chapati...not exactly the way Kenyans eat them!). 

The whole endeavor was short and sweet.  I got all excited and started jumping up and down as the mandazi fried in the pan.  They turned out pretty much like the real thing, I think.  The only slight difference is that we're on a bit of a health kick at our house, so we're using white whole wheat flour these days (I figure Kenyans are practical and use what they have, so I cannot bother myself with making a trip to the store for white flour).  So they were very brown looking mandazi but nice and fluffy and delicious all the same.  It takes me right back to those Sunday mornings last summer when Rachel and I would leave our apartment early in the morning to spend time doing devotions with the boys from the juvenile.  We never made time for breakfast at home, so we'd grab some mandazi from the street vendor near Kibera before jumping on the bus.  I can perfectly picture the lady cooking the mandazi, flipping each one as the oil sizzled.  Ahhh, yes...

I will post pictures of my mandazi goodness soon because at the present moment I have left my camera cord in the computer at work--typical.  So in the meantime, perhaps I should go clean out my purse!