The Namaacha Diet

One of the most popular questions I have gotten so far…what do you eat in Mozambique? Well, generally I do not eat breakfast. No one in my house does, but I do know a lot of my fellow volunteers do having everything from corn flakes and milk to cheese with bread or just a bowl of batatas fritas, French fries. Then around 9:30 a.m. its lanche time. Lanche is a little snack. Minha mae usually gives me a roll of Maria or Agua e Sal crackers, a mango juice box and a banana.  Maria crackers are sweet kind of like a graham cracker and Agua e Sal are pretty much saltines, but even drier. Then we usually eat almocar around noon. I usually come home from training to eat with minha mae. Usually lunch is a potato, carrot, egg, fish and oil salad or chicken and rice with salad or beans and rice, or leftovers from dinner the night before. Sometimes I get an orange in there too. Then we usually eat dinner around 7:30-8 p.m. Dinner is usually a lot of carbohydrates, some form of protein and then salad. The carbohydrates rotate between rice, pasta, batatas fritas, mandioca or xima, which is a traditional Mozambican meal. Minha mae absolutely loves it. It is pretty comparable to grits back home, but here they eat it as a huge ball and then usually have some sort of sauce or meat with it. Minha mae said I couldn’t have it for the first couple weeks because my stomach couldn’t handle it. She would make me my own batch of batatas fritas while the rest of the family would eat xima. We also eat a lot of soup. Usually everyone will eat a bowl of soup, similar to a chicken noodle vegetable, before dinner. The protein rotates between galinha (chicken), carne de vaca (beef), fish (usually with the head still on it) or beans. And then the salad is usually lettuce, tomato and onion, generally soaking in oil and vinegar.  After minha mae served me a heaping bowl of batatas fritas the other night, I tried to explain to her that I rarely eat batatas fritas in the United States. I told her that usually I would just eat the chicken and salad. She just looked at me and said, “Voce esta en Africa, come.” Meaning...."In Africa, you eat!" And as for drinks, I generally just have my filtered water. The very first day I moved in minha mae asked what I liked to drink. After she was shocked that I didn’t drink tea or coffee, she asked me if I drink soda. In the states I would rarely if ever drink soda, but I told her that while I didn’t drink Coca-cola, yes, I would drink the Fanta she was already pouring for me. She then gave me Fanta pretty much every day with my lanche for the first week. I had to tell her I can’t drink Fanta every day so now it is just once in a while.

Minha mae and my sister Suzete do most of the cooking. Occasionally they will let me help with washing the vegetables for the salad by soaking them in Javel (bleach). Recently, they let me peel potatoes, but only after my irma made sure that I knew exactly how to do it. 

But last Tuesday our language class spent the morning cooking with our maes. My two classmates and I spent at least five hours preparing lunch. We started at 7:30 a.m. when we usually start class. We first learned how to wash and cut couvre (cabbage). Almost instantly my friend Anna’s mae started yelling, “Tomar um photo.” She wanted us to take a picture of everything and not just one picture, but a picture of each of us doing every step along the way. She said it was so we could show our mothers back home. We then learned how to pilhar (mash) peanuts and then sift out the shells, which is actually a lot harder than it sounds. Then we had to crack coconuts and shave out the inside to then collect the coconut milk, which was quite the labor intensive process. After that, it was time to kill the chicken. What’s that you say? Yes, Agora vamos a mater um galinha. Minha mae had wanted me to kill a chicken about a week ago, but I told her I wasn’t ready for that just yet. I was able to put it off for a week. Then, the night before our cooking session, she said, “Amanha voce va a mater um galinha.” I swallowed hard and said, “Okay, I think I can do that.” Inside I was freaking out. Then, when I saw the little chicken running around our yard the next morning, I knew his fate before he did. First, Anna grabbed the chicken but its wings. She was then responsible for holding onto the feet, while Sabrina held onto the wings and I was handed the knife. I started a distressed laughter slash crying as Paola, one of our trainers, stretched out its neck and directed my hand with the knife. If she hadn’t given me the extra push and direction, this episode would have lasted a lot longer. This was definitely a first, my inner pseudo-vegetarian was screaming and I was trying to recall what else I had killed in my life and aside from a few mice and cockroaches I couldn’t come up with much. Sabrina said a nice little prayer before the act and that was it. Donezo. But, it was just the beginning because Paola then showed us how we had to pour hot water on the chicken in order to pluck out all its feathers. She then degutted it removing internal organs. And before we knew it, she had it sitting in a mixture of oil, salt, lemon and chicken stock broth seasoning. And then it was on the grill. Phew. It took me a little while to gain composure, honestly, I think I might have blacked out those few brief moments of the actual killing. Ahhh. Anyways, we then continued our lunch preparations with a few American traditions. We made banana bread and guacamole for our maes to try. The measurements weren’t exact on the bread and we had to cook it in this pressure cooker forno type thing, but it turned out delicious. And the guacamole was a hit. By the time 12:30 p.m. rolled around, we had prepared so much food. We set a table outside and dug in. It was quite the feast. Minha mae even got Fanta, Coco-Cola and Lemon Twist for everyone so it was definitely a special occasion. After five hours of preparation, we spent about an hour indulging and it was delicious. Well worth the work. Even the chicken was delicious. Sabrina’s irmao especially enjoyed the chicken feet. Eek!