(SHEF) Chef Elizabeth

KENYA 🇰🇪

COVID-19 UPDATE: Orders are delivered through Doordash and can be left at your house without contact if desired.

📍No Physical Address. This chef can be found through shef.com. If you use this link, you can get $20 credit and I will get $10. Eat the World Los Angeles has no affiliation with this website, and paid for this order in full.

For more about the chefs and cuisines available on shef.com, please read the article about Chef Ahlam's Palestinian/Jordanian cuisine from last week. For a second straight time, experiences with this website were rewarded with a real quality and good value set of meals.

When people talk about East African food in Los Angeles, over 90% of it is probably thanks to the wide variety of Ethiopian restaurants that the city is blessed to call its own. In Little Ethiopia and South Los Angeles, the cuisine is ubiquitous, while a smattering of restaurants are also spread throughout Southern California.

But there are a few other countries represented, with Eritrea also represented at Industry Café & Jazz, Somalia's last remaining spot in Inglewood, and a magical Ugandan home chef experience in Van Nuys. For a taste of Kenya, a trip can be made down to San Diego, or Chef Elizabeth can be found on this new (to LA) service.

This recent shipment came in six large containers but was way more than six meals for two people, each packed to the top with traditional Kenyan favorites.

Despite having to reheat everything since you are not visiting a restaurant, the meals all held up very well and were delicious. Make sure to order the chapati lentil meal ($9.99, above) to sample the chef's lavishly buttery chapati, best heated up in a pan rather than the microwave.

While vegetarian, the kamande (lentil stew) is thick and hearty and can be scooped up perfectly with the chapati. Three big pieces come with an order and are enough to fill all but the most hungry customers.

The snack platter ($10.99, above) is a good look at a couple of the various food inspirations that have been injected into the country over the years. It includes four ground turkey samosas, with some toned down but delicious spices of South Asia and a chopped up sausage roll. This is surrounded by a flaky puff pastry and must show some culinary legacy from Kenya's colonization history from the British.

For a distinctly Kenyan treat, try the ugali beef collards meal ($12.99, below), which showcases the cornmeal staple of ugali. This is often called a porridge, but is extremely firm and should be used to pick up and enjoy bites from the other parts of the plate.

Like their friends in West Africa, ground nuts and peanut stews are an important part of the diet and Chef Elizabeth makes an excellent chicken in peanut butter sauce ($12.99, above). This dish of chicken thighs is smothered in a sweet and savory creamy peanut sauce and accompanied by white rice and a side of pickled cabbage and vegetables that can be eaten separately or added for zip.

Githeri ($9.99, below) is another Kenyan staple consisting mostly of corn and beans. The chef uses pinto beans and small yellow corn, adds cabbage and potatoes and creates a tomato, garlic, and onion sauce that features the Kenyan Royco spice mix.

While the history of githeri is as food for students for a century in Kenya because of easy access to its staple ingredients, the dish is also becoming more popular in trendy city restaurants and amongst young professionals. Tourists can always find a plate of githeri in their hotel restaurants, and will find it hard to visit Kenya without trying it at least once.

Finish off an order with a plate of crepes na mandazi ($10.99, below), which features the two items in its title. The crepe is wrapped tightly and dense and features fresh fruit on top, but even more exciting are mandazi, a fried bread invention of the Swahili people that is often referred to as a donut and enjoyed as a sweet treat at any time of day.

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