FOOD

Whenever traveling to a foreign country, probably the number one question from the folks back home is... "so how's the food?" ;)

Well, my answer's pretty easy, because the food in Mozambique is... CARBS. CARBS AND CARBS AND MORE CARBS, all day every day, all the time CARBS. Yes.

Well okay, there is other food too, and most of it's actually pretty tasty. And Peace Corps tells our host families that we're required to have fruits and veggies every day. So I actually have a fairly balanced diet, apart from all the CARBS. But hey, that's what running is for, right? ;)

So here's an overview of some of the various foods I eat here, and the low-down on how some of them are prepared.

Getting the charcoal ready to cook

My host-family's indoor kitchen

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Peanuts

So, peanut butter here isn't as common as in the U.S., but peanut powder is used a fair amount here in Namaacha in southern Mozambique. Ready-powdered peanuts are probably sold somewhere, but that stuff's expensive, so my host-family pounds the peanuts themselves.

Pounding peanuts. Use the force...

Sifting the pounded peanuts to re-pound the remaining large bits

Coconut Milk

So if you thought you knew what coconut milk was... you're probably wrong (At least, I was. And I choose to believe I'm not the only one. I refuse to hear otherwise.). It's not the watery liquid that you can drink right after you crack it open- called the coconut water. The milk is what you get after you scrape out the white flesh, squeeze it with your hands while pouring hot water over it, and filter it through a strainer. Then, it's often mixed with peanut powder and cooked with various types of meals, as explained below.

Coconut!

Scraping out the coconut meat

Squeezing out the coconut milk- the actual coconut flesh left over (left)  isn't used directly in meals

Fish
So... fish. It's really a really common meal in Namaacha- gutted and grilled whole. Or, thrown whole into a pot of boiling coconut milk/peanut mixture. I'm not the biggest fan of this meal, but since my mãe doesn't make me eat the heads it's not too bad, as long as I manage to get most of the bones out. I only dread this meal on days when I'm already feeling a bit queasy and not looking forward to spending so much time picking crunchy fish bones out of my teeth ;)

Gutting the fish- a common meal in Namaacha, grilled whole

Beans

Beans are pretty easy to get around here too, and I really like when my family makes it, with, diced carrots, garlic, and oil. 

Matapa/Couve

There's a common veggie meal here that seems to go by various names depending on the type of plant used- either matapa when it's cooked with cassava leaves, or with couve, a kale relative. It also has diced onion, sometimes garlic, and is all boiled together in the coconut milk/peanut sauce. I could do without the onions, but otherwise it's pretty good!

Xima

Xima is one of the largest staples of the Mozambican diet. The ingredients can vary throughout the country, but my family here usually makes it by boiling corn flour, and then leaving it to solidify into a thick consistency similar to stiff mashed potatoes or grits. Usually either xima or rice is eaten with every meal. My mãe told me that when she was a kid, she also liked eating xima warm before it solidified, when it would be more like what we'd think of as porridge-consistency. She had me try some, with some sugar sprinkled on top. I actually liked it a lot- like a Mozambican cream-of-wheat :)

Couve with xima

Rice

Rice is... well, rice. Y'all know what it is. I eat it pretty much every day, unless I'm eating xima instead. 

Pasta

One of my favorite comfort-food meals is spaghetti- here we usually make it with some diced carrots and salt. No weird stuff. Though my family loves eating it with TONS of bread. Like I said, CARBS...

Cassava

Cassava, or mandioca, is also very common here. Slightly more dense and stringy than potatoes, cassava can be mashed or fried, or anything else you can think of. Mozambicans especially like their fried stuff.

Fried cassava chunks

Bread

I didn't really expect it, but at least here in Namaacha, there's really good bread. White bread, anyway- I haven't seen any wheat bread yet. It gets baked fresh every day at various places in town, and it's what I usually have for breakfast every day, with butter or peanut butter (which is expensive but since my host family gets compensated quite a bit for hosting a volunteer, they bought it as a special thing. Occasionally if I get up early enough, I'll make a fried egg to go with it (with the bread, not the peanut butter) because EGGS ARE AMAZING.

Fresh bread roll for breakfast

WITH FRIED EGGS AND BUTTER

Cake (and Coffee)

So cake, or bolo, does exist here as well, though it's often not as sweet as in the U.S. One afternoon when I had gotten off class early, I helped my mãe make bolo, and as a treat she also brought out some real coffee to drink with it. I'm not usually a coffee drinker, but my mãe insisted on my having some. It had been given to her by a previous volunteer who brought it from the States, since real coffee is rare and/or expensive here. So I loaded it up with sugar, and together with the cake it was pretty good! My Austrian side of the family will be so proud. Kaffee und kuchen in Mozambique :)

Special day- afternoon coffee and cake!

Mãe sitting at her barraca with cake

Sugarcane

So look, I'm from the Midwest, and therefore all this tropical food is super exciting and exotic to me. One day when we were sitting outside next to the barraca, my mãe brought over this big plant stalk, started cutting the center into chunks, and chewing on them, just like that. I thought that was kind of weird, since it didn't look like it tasted all that great. It was a pretty tough, woody-looking plant. But then my mãe explained that it was cana doce- or sugarcane. "You can just eat it?" I asked. I'd always assumed that raw sugarcane didn't actually taste sweet- I figured it had a higher sugar content than other plants, but still had to be processed and so on in order to extract the sugar in high quantities. But mãe cut me some chunks, and DUDE THIS PLANT IS THE COOLEST THING EVER. You just chew on it and suck out the sugar. My mãe has a bunch growing in the garden out back, though they have to be carefully guarded because people will steal them. Uh, yeah I WOULD (just kidding...). Apparently the stalks are sometimes sold at the market, though they can be pricey. 

Sugar cane!

A chunk of the sugar cane stem- just chew on it like candy

Masala
Okay, so you know in The Lion King movie, when Rafiki cracks open this fruit and spreads the juice on baby Simba's forehead? That fruit is a masala, which also goes by about a million other names, but that's what it's called in Mozambique. It's got a hard green shell, which you crack open and the inside is full of hard seeds covered in brown slimy goo. The brown goo is the part you eat, and it's actually delicious, like sweet apple pie. It's kind of annoying to eat though, because you don't get much, and you have to eat around all the seeds. STILL COOL THOUGH.

Masala

Chicken
Apart from fish, the other most common type of meat here is chicken. Fresh chicken. I won't say too much more here, because this is a story which needs its own post. Needless to say, though, it concerns certain rites of passage for volunteers here in Mozambique... and some look forward to it more than others. I'll get to that story as soon as I can :)