What I'm eating

The food here is delicious. Yes, this is going to be a post all about food. In Namibia during my homestays, I was often served the same thing every day: cornmeal porridge, sauce and some kind of meat. Granted, sometimes it was interesting trying to figure out what kind of meat I was being served, but there is only so much entertainment to be found in mystery meat. I would have killed for a vegetable dish. Tanzania used to be a popular destination for Arab and Asian traders many centuries ago. In fact, the main language, Swahili, is is a combination of Bantu (the umbrella name for peoples who originated in Western Africa), Arabic, English and bits of many others. If their languages were mixing, you can just imagine what the food was doing.

There are two main starches served here: ugali (cornmeal porridge) and pilau (spiced rice). I mentioned the word 'pilaf' today to Edson, but he had never heard it before. If my memory serves me, pilaf is a baked rice dish that originated in what is now Iran. Since Zanzibar used to be the home of a sultanate, it would not surprise me if pilaf was a regular item on the menu. Many of the words “borrowed” from other languages get altered slightly, so it's not a big jump from 'pilaf' to 'pilau.' Anyway, it's delicious. Pilau is generally eaten with 2-5 other dishes that are usually prepared in a sauce. So far I've had (I'm guessing on some of the ingredients): beans in a white sauce; broccoli and leeks in a peanut sauce; a potato, cauliflower, tomato and carrot curry; something that tasted like mung beans in sesame paste; spinach; peas in a mint sauce; and zucchini with tomatoes. The rice goes on the plate first, then a few spoonfuls from each of the other dishes, and finally it's all mixed together and eaten. There is also fruit served at every meal. I guess it's whatever the cook finds at the market that day. Last night Hawa served three different kinds of fruit plus chunks of avocado. Unlike Namibia, I haven't eaten a lot of meat since I got here, and frankly, I'm fine with that.

I'm sad that I won't be able to stay at Dorcas's house in August. She has another guest coming and CARE is arranging to find me another place to live. Hawa's cooking is pretty amazing and I will miss it. Rather than going out for lunch or having it catered, CARE has created a lunch club, or to be more precise a 'chakula' club. The fee for each month is 25,000/= which comes out to around $24. I bet you wish you could eat a homemade lunch everyday for the price of a little over one dollar. The ladies running the chakula club are pretty amazing cooks too. I almost wrote 'mamas running...' but that would have been incorrect. Mama is an N-class noun and is not pluralized, kind of in the way fish and deer are not pluralized. Mama wanapika chakula! By the way, Mama is what you use to refer to any woman between the ages of 20 and 60 and does not necessarily mean that the woman is a mother.