Oh, bring us a figgy pudding

I have spent the holiday season with my parents in their country house in the middle of the pine forest in the Southwest of France.

It has been a relaxing holiday: a bit of running in the morning, cooking and eating twice a day, and lazing by the fireplace most of the rest of the time.

Christmas day lunch was particularly generous. My grand-aunt Odette had invited us to a very good restaurant and decided we should all have the Christmas lunch. It so happened that 25 December 2012 had been assigned to me as a day where I should document all my food intake so as to contribute to the French online survey on health and nutrition Nutri-Net Santé. I was therefore busy taking notes of all the food I was eating at the restaurant. You'll see from the photo on the side (click on it to increase the size and read the detail) that this was definitely not a normal meal.

My dinner on that day was very frugal to compensate. Now that I am going back to Nairobi, I have to come back to a healthier diet too.

Happy and delicious 2013 to all!

We wish you a merry Christmas
Traditional carol, John Williams and the Boston Pops, We wish you a merry Christmas, Philips
(no figgy pudding line in this version but an exuberant orchestra, most fitting to welcome the new year)

The first time...

There were lots of musical and food-related Kenyan firsts for me this past week.

I performed for the first time with the Nairobi Music Society choir in their Christmas concert inside All Saints Anglican Cathedral of Nairobi last week end. I was even given a solo and shared the spotlight with three other local singers in a Renaissance quartet. Because the choir and orchestra were already taking up all the space between the elevated Cathedral choir and the audience in the naive, all four soloists were asked to squeeze into the elevated pulpit. It was a snug fit.

On Saturday night I went to see my first Kenyan musical at the National Theatre. ‘Seventeen’ was a show about a class of high school teenagers with a Dr Jekyll-&-Mr Hyde-type girl in the leading role. The lyrics were intelligent, the tunes catchy and arrangements groovy. The strings in the small live orchestra could have done with further tuning practice, but overall, it was a commendable musical performance composed and produced by the staff and students of the Kenya Conservatoire of Music.

I baked my first batch of pastry from my new oven in my apartment. Because I am still waiting for my furniture and cooking utensils to arrive from Paris, all I had were the two sauce trays provided with the oven. So I baked butter biscuits and shared them with colleagues. I am glad to report that the oven is working fine.

I went to the Agha Khan University Hospital on Wednesday to see a doctor. The hospital is supposed to be the best in town; it is definitely not as glitzy as the hospitals I had been to in Bangkok but the staff were competent and I got all the medication I wanted for the small ailments I had. What is the link here with music and food? It was Jamhuri Day, the national day of Kenya. So the television in the waiting room was broadcasting a special programme of whole-day national community-building songs performed by various choirs in different locations of the country. I had a very musical, although rather long, wait to see the doctor. Food: I was given a deworming treatment for my high white blood cell count. Probably some parasite I got because of eating too many good things in other exotic places…

The first time ever I saw your face

Johnny Cash, The man comes around, Universal Mercury records

Photos: Singing quartet, Musical theatre, Eating cookies, Hospital room

How can you have any pudding if you don't eat yer meat?

Last week ILRI held its end-of-year party on the Nairobi campus. It was a BIG party: there was food, drink and music for probably 400 people from noon to midnight. Colleagues from other campuses around the world had also joined thanks to meetings they were attending in town on that day. So it was a good opportunity for me to meet new colleagues whom I had not yet been introduced to.

 The food reflected Kenyan party fare: barbequed meat, lots of it. There was grilled mutton, grilled chicken, grilled sausages, even an entire cow slowly roasting throughout the party so that there was food available at all times. I discovered and quite enjoyed the local mutura: grilled traditional Kenyan black pudding sausages made from most of an animal’s bowels and blood, with lots of spices added in to overcome the strong smell and taste. 

We were entertained throughout the party by singing, dancing and drama performed by staff members in the ILRI got talent competition. The DJs did a great job keeping the party spirit alive throughout the day despite the large amount of food and drink we had all ingested. The music and bass loudspeakers pumped until late that night with a mix of African and Dance music.

It was great fun to work for ILRI on that day.

Another brick in the wall
Pink Floyd, The wall, EMI

Clip-clop, giddy-up!

Read my latest blog post on ILRI clippings: where I want to go in the next few years of my work life with the International Livestock Research Institute.

Clip-clop
Cloud cult, Advice from the happy hippopotamus, Rebel group

Lay off of my shoes!

One does not usually eat shoes, but I find they are just as desirable as food.

Click here to learn how this...



    ...can be turned into this.


Blue suede shoes
Elvis Presley, The essential Elvis Presley, Strategic marketing

Come on, dance and sing!

 

Yesterday was the first Friday of the month and like every first Friday of the month, there was a barbeque and karaoke night on the ILRI Nairobi campus, organized by the Housing, catering and conferencing team for the staff, their family and guests. Great food: hamburgers, chicken legs and mutton steaks, all grilled by the chefs upon request. I had the mutton with chips and fresh tomatoes and found they were delicious. The bar at the ILRI Enkare Club would serve you any drink you wanted at a very reasonable price.

And there was music with a DJ. Live music too: we were the ones doing it with the karaoke. After Asian karaoke in Bangkok, I had a great time with African karaoke. I must try to learn the tunes to local Swahili songs as the words are easy to follow because they are written in the Latin alphabet. The closest I could get to singing an African song was The lion sleeps tonight.



Colleagues were having a great time eating, drinking, singing, and dancing. People would just rise up from their chairs and start swaying their hips in time with the music. It seems they know how to party here. So I am really looking forward to the ILRI Christmas dinner in early December. We may all be committed to improving agricultural systems in which livestock are important at ILRI, but it is still important to relax and enjoy other things than work with colleagues.


Everybody
Madonna, Madonna, Sire/Warner Bros

Gotta go back, back, back to school again

To read about my first experience in teaching animal production systems and markets of developing countries to young postgraduate students, click here.

Back to school again

Soundtrack from the original motion picture Grease 2, Paramount

Photo: Eugène Trutat