Sunday 5 March 2017

Wind and Korma

It's windy, and I'm not just talking about the fact we live on a diet of beans. The weather since Storm Doris has been grim. High winds each day mean we are constantly fighting battles picking up crates blowing away, or trying to make sure the wind doesn't send our food flying off down the camp. There has been driving rain, hail, sleet, and even a pretty impressive lightning storm the other day. It makes our life harder, but it makes life in camp for the refugees intolerable. I've talked before about shoes, or lack there of, and this is a much more acute problem in the wet. The ground in camp is basically stones and mud, with a single road that runs through the center of it. When the rain is heavy parts of it become very swampy, and you see people tripping over lots. Lack of decent shoes means many of these guys live with permanently wet feet which leads to all sorts of nasties on their feet. Many just have flip-flops and no real shoes, or shoes that are to small so they are forced to cut the backs off in order to get their feet in them, so they offer no protection to the elements at all. It makes me think of Glastonbury '97 where is didn't pack wellies, only a pair of tatty old combat boots, and ended up getting trench foot and having to have the boots cut off my feet at the end of the festival, pretty grim.

I've been coking with Annie over the last couple of days, and it's been really good fun. She's super chilled out, and it makes getting the work done very easy. Yesterday we spent ages putting together a Korma for today's service. Someone went off to the shops to buy us some coconut milk, but came back with what I can only describe as a condensed milk version of it. It's kind of this grey jelly sludge that's super sweet and coconutty. At first there was a bit of panic as we were already past the point of no return cooking, so committed to the recipe, but we figured what the hell and put it in. It's made probably the best Korma I have ever tasted. There's a lot of this that goes on, bodging up recipes on the fly, and working with what presents itself. It's very good fun, and so far we haven't produced anything that I haven't been happy to serve, but there is always that slight worry that it might not work out well, and ruin a 1000 meals worth of food. Annie has an amazing job working on a elk ranch in Texas during the season, she is going to make inquiries about maybe getting me a little work out there for a month or two in September which I would love. I'm spending this afternoon looking at visas that may let me do an internship there.

Ok that's about all for today, it can be hard thinking of fresh content to write each time I log on, but hopefully tomorrow will present itself with some new stories.

T

No comments:

Post a Comment