Heritage Recipe #1: Coconut Beans

In 2007, I returned to Kenya for a visit 8 years after we moved to the U.S. My dad and I visited the village where I spent the first 10 years of my life, and I was sucked into this surreal vortex of “was this my life?” Everything was sharply familiar—the old road to Tanzania crumbling to a narrow trail beside our house, the massive mango and cashew nut trees, the same neighbors, though aged—but it was more like a dream that I’d had before, where it felt like everything only existed in my head in the first place.

One of those familiar and strange things was how pitch-black dark it was. One night we walked across the road and down a dirt path to visit friends for a meal, and the blackness was so intense my eyes hurt. All I could see was the skinny beam of light from one flashlight, critters flashing through it, and the bright stars.

My undergraduate capstone, which I completed not long after the trip, was a series of poems about returning to Kenya. I scrounged up this one, which attempted to capture this meal, these feelings, this darkness:

Tambukira (To Remember)

Fatuma sits on a low stool by the fire, her spoon rotating around a sufuria, smoke trailing into the palms. A yellow kerosene lantern softens shadows across her cheekbones as she looks up, greets me quietly. I sit on a mat, shifting my legs under a long skirt as speech halts, sentences break; I have no words for college, snow, freeways. She takes out an envelope of photographs. In one, a baby is tied snugly to her back. Years later, a girl plays with Kadara on a battered stoop. She looks like she belongs, I think, not sure I recognize myself in the space this small, white face filled. 

We eat cassava root boiled in coconut milk, pressing it around spiced meat. Dark sits heavy, blurs our shapes. Quiet, we search each other for memory. I want to hold this beauty, the endless face of the Kenya I knew. Black trees blot patches of stars flung like dust across the sky, folding us close, a small circle, dream in the midst of someone’s sleep. I cannot ask, What waits to be awakened?

I can’t get cassava here (although I bought tapioca recently to make pudding, and the bag says they are the same thing as cassava. Is this true??), so I want to share another Kenyan recipe that I make from time to time, coconut beans, called maharagwe ya nazi in Swahili. It is especially good with the flatbread chapati, the most perfect form of carbs in the world; done the Kenyan way, chapati turns out flaky, dense, tender, with just the right amount of soft chewiness and grease.

I try my best to soak beans from scratch (we're pretty good with soaking and then freezing chickpeas for Isaac's hummus), but I'll be honest: I use a lot of canned beans. Fresh coconuts are, uh, hard to come by, not to mention not worth the trouble, so I feel fine about using canned coconut milk.

So here's my Americanized and easy version of coconut beans (thanks for this, Mom):

Ingredients

1/2 a yellow onion, chopped
2 cans pinto or kidney beans, drained
1 can coconut milk
Cumin, salt, and pepper to taste

Instructions

Saute onion. When nice and translucent, add beans, coconut milk, and seasonings. Simmer. Serve with rice. (See, I said it was easy. Too easy.)

Also, here's a link to learn how to make chapati. They're a little time intensive, so I don't do them often. If you want a veggie to go along with this meal too, I recommend sautéed collard greens (the equivalent to sukuma wiki in Kenya).